a dying dinosaur
Read this:
Steve Jobs' thoughts on DRM technology
It's basically the obvious point that so many people have been making for a long time. Digital Rights Managment doesn't work. People complaining about proprietary players and stores locking them into one brand are full of shit. Jobs said it with statistics and inbetween the lines, that 97% of music being played on his own precious iPod is either ripped from a cd or pirated. It's obvious that, when you produce a player with the capacity to hold ten thousand songs, that capacity can't be filled by the average CD collection or even the average wallet and an internet store. He even mentions that the Big Four aren't even making much profit off protected music, compared to their main revenues from CD sales.
So what's the point? If you're selling most of your music in unprotected format, since CD players can't play DRM-encoded music, then stop being hypocrites and complaining about copy protection, since it's not even securing you any revenue. There's no way they're going to be able to develop any kind of technology to protect their rights to music any more, it's just pointless to even waste the time and effort to try.
Now, whether the major music companies should even have those rights is another issue entirely, but that has a healthy and growing resistance of people who actually own the rights to their own work (gasp!), and even start their own companies to distribute it, in the "indie rock" movement. And the music is better too. Okay, I'm elitist. :)
Steve Jobs' thoughts on DRM technology
It's basically the obvious point that so many people have been making for a long time. Digital Rights Managment doesn't work. People complaining about proprietary players and stores locking them into one brand are full of shit. Jobs said it with statistics and inbetween the lines, that 97% of music being played on his own precious iPod is either ripped from a cd or pirated. It's obvious that, when you produce a player with the capacity to hold ten thousand songs, that capacity can't be filled by the average CD collection or even the average wallet and an internet store. He even mentions that the Big Four aren't even making much profit off protected music, compared to their main revenues from CD sales.
So what's the point? If you're selling most of your music in unprotected format, since CD players can't play DRM-encoded music, then stop being hypocrites and complaining about copy protection, since it's not even securing you any revenue. There's no way they're going to be able to develop any kind of technology to protect their rights to music any more, it's just pointless to even waste the time and effort to try.
Now, whether the major music companies should even have those rights is another issue entirely, but that has a healthy and growing resistance of people who actually own the rights to their own work (gasp!), and even start their own companies to distribute it, in the "indie rock" movement. And the music is better too. Okay, I'm elitist. :)