DRM
How I tried (and failed at) legally buying music in Germany
Please note: What’s about to follow is a rant. It’s also advice to music labels. Short-short version, dear content traders: Make your stuff more easily available.
This is a story of a sucky customer experience. As customers and experts alike will tell you, users like to rock, not to suck.
Buying music online is supposedly easy. Or […]
Do we need standards to protect customers online?
Google has decided to discontinue their online video store, effectively just taking back the DRM-”protected” videos they had sold before. (BoingBoing has a brief round-up.)
This just shows, again, how deadly all the license agreements are that all users click through on a daily basis. (Yes: you, too.) Basically, whenever you purchase or rent anything on […]
Cory Doctorow: New column about copy-friendly business models
The Guardian has started a 5-part column (”Copy Killers”) by Cory Doctorow. In the series, Cory shows what is so bad about Digital Rights Managements (DRM, also dubbed Digital Restrictions Management), and explain copy-friendly business models.
DRMs are often designed by ambitious, well-funded consortia, with top-notch engineers from every corner of the industry. They spend […]
IFPI rhetorics imply that file-sharing supports terrorism
A few days ago, IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) put out a press release titled “ten inconvenient truths“, which claims to offer new insights into the dirty world of digital piracy.
Apart from the fact that the titles is a rather weak reference to the movie about Al Gore and global warming (”An Inconvenient […]
Great 09 F9 … art
I just love how quickly and creatively the issue around “09 F9 …” has spawned a bunch of cool art. As you can imagine, I’m a huge fan of art, especially of mash-ups and politically inspired art. So to me, it’s just great to watch the creativity unfold here.
Let’s see:
There’s the flickr group.
We’ve got […]
iTunes will sell the complete EMI catalog DRM-free
Apple and EMI announced that the whole EMI catalog will be sold through the iTunes music store DRM-free:
Higher-quality music files, which will play on any computer and any digital-audio player, will not replace the copy-protected EMI music currently sold through iTunes. Rather, they will complement the standard 99-cent iTunes downloads and will be sold at […]
P2P is media piracy’s biggest enemy
BoingBoing quotes a great story about how P2P filesharing puts media pirates out of business:
A media pirate — someone who sells pirated DVDs and CDs for a living — complains that P2P has put him out of business. People might be willing to buy legit music online even though P2P exists (…), but they won’t […]
Why DRM drives piracy
Jim Baen explains the connection between DRM & piracy, and why DRM doesn’t stop, but foster piracy:
Electronic copyright infringement is something that can only become an “economic epidemic” under certain conditions. Any one of the following:
1) The product they want—electronic texts—are hard to find, and thus valuable.
2) The products they want are high-priced, so there’s […]
re:publica program is online
The conference program for re:publica 07 (April 11-13, 2007, Berlin, upcoming.org link) is online. (Sorry - German only, so far.) If you happen to be in Berlin at the time, I’m sure it’s worth dropping by. Markus and his folks sure got an interesting bunch of speakers together (including, hopefully, Larry Lessig), and it’ll be […]
“Piracy is Progressive Taxation…”
“… and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution” is the title of an essay Tim O’Reilly wrote in 2002. Occasionally I re-read it, and every single time I’m baffled about how he just got it right. I guess that’s exactly what makes a great writer/thinker stand out. Once I had the great opportunity […]
Anti-Lock In Law for web apps?
The more web apps we use, and the better they are, the more we trust them with our data. Apart from all privacy issues: Lock-in is becoming more and more of a problem. What happens to your pictures (and the way you sorted them) when you cancel your flickr account? What about Gmail, Google Calendar […]
Code Monkey like Fritos
The Code Monkey Song. It’s been around for awhile, but it’s awesome:
Code Monkey get up get coffee
Code Monkey go to job
Code Monkey have boring meeting
With boring manager Rob
Rob say Code Monkey very dilligent
But his output stink
His code not “functional” or “elegant”
What do Code Monkey think?
Code Monkey think maybe manager want to write god damned login […]
Oscar torrents
Ha, this is hilarious. Piratebay launched OscarTorrents:
OscarTorrents is the Oscars as it should be — everyone can download the year’s nominations using the popular BitTorrent service, watch the movies, then use our rating system to choose their favourites. Why restrict the voting to a few bought-off jurors when the whole world can have their say?
Now […]
Ode to the R.I.A.A.
David Pogue, tech columnist at the New York Times, comments only indirectly on the arrest of DJ Drama.
DJ Drama, mixtape maker extraordinaire, was arrested when his office was raided. Obviously the R.I.A.A. is suing him for creating mixtapes. No matter that the whole concept of mixtapes is, more or less by definition, a win-win situation…
Mixtapes […]
The Venice Project goes public beta
The Venice Project, an IP-TV project by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis (the good guys behind Kazaa and Skype), has gone public beta and changed names. Now officially dubbed Joost, it has been subject of quite a bit of discussion lately. Given their track record, you can count on two things: It’s peer-to-peer based, and […]
My name is Peter Bihr. I live in Berlin, Germany. As a freelancer, I consult on web strategies, communities, blogging and social media. In this weblog, I jot down random thoughts, ideas and news. Hopefully, you'll find some are interesting for you, too. 