Art Machine
Just another former infatuation junkie

“You can’t own a song, maaan. It’s like, one of God’s creatures, y’dig?” – somebody, possibly me

Hey! Anybody out there use the Yahoo! Music Store? Anybody? Um… anybody?

Well, if you do, you’re royally screwed. Yahoo! is getting out of the music business, and they’re taking the keys to your music with them. (Link via Boing Boing)

Once the Yahoo store goes down and the key servers go offline, existing tracks cannot be authorized to play on new computers. Instead, Yahoo recommends the old, lame, and lossy workaround of burning the files to CD, then reripping them onto the computer. Sure, you’ll lose a bunch of blank CDs, sound quality, and all the metadata, but that’s a small price to pay for the privilege of being able to listen to that music you lawfully acquired. Good thing you didn’t download it illegally or just buy it on CD!

No matter how you slice it or how many times the RIAA or MPAA try to tell you DRM is for your own good or that it allows the customer “to enjoy their music in the best possible way,” it’s just a bad idea. It destroys your ability to choose, and in some cases it also destroys your ability to own. No consumer asked for this. As Cory Doctorow told Microsoft, “No Sony customer woke up one morning and said, ‘Damn, I wish Sony would devote some expensive engineering effort in order that I may do less with my music.’”

Ars Technica points out that this same thing happened recently with MSN who, after public outcry, agreed to keep their DRM servers running until 2011 – so you get a full three years more to enjoy your music! Yay!

Of course, nobody seems to be remembering that DRM-encoded Google Videos got deactivated when they got out of selling content, or that the MLB has used its DRM scheme to turn off purchased (not rented) digital downloads of their games. Because, after all, those are video and not audio, and apparently the exploitation of DRM by greedy corporations who already have their money aren’t worth noting if they weren’t in your particular media.

Here’s the simple truth. MSN, Yahoo! Music, Google Video Store, and the MLB all demonstrate one simple fact. If you are a customer of a DRM encoding store for any kind of media, then you are not purchasing your content – you’re renting it. No matter what they tell you about how you just purchased your music free and clear, they all reserve the right to just turn your music/video/ebooks off and leave you with gigabytes of worthless data.

The expectation many had that the next-generation HD format would take off once the format war was over is pretty much a forgotten dream at this point. Sales of Blu-Ray haven’t experienced the massive jump people expected once wait-and-see consumers saw that HD-DVD was well and truly dead.

Consumers are balking at the $300-plus cost of most Blu-ray players especially because only limited movie titles are available in the format.

“People aren’t going to pay three times as much for a platform that’s only half-baked,” said Steve Wilson, a consumer electronics analyst with ABI Research.

The problem with both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats, of course, was largely the library. Perhaps it’s only obvious to me, but when you’re touting the superiority of the platform as a prestige format, you might want to consider releasing Citizen Kane – a movie with a long history that most people would display proudly in their collection, and something more likely to be cherished by someone who just dropped $399 on a player – instead of, say, Ultraviolet – a movie whose design concept can best be described as “blurry, obviously fake, and designed above all to not be viewed in HD.”

This in turn feeds the price question. Why should people pay a prestige price for a player where the majority of titles are movies that people just flat don’t care about seeing in HD – many of which are $20+ on the new format when they’re already in the bargain bins on the old? I just purchased Alien, Aliens, and Alien 3 on DVD for $5.99 each – movies I care about having in my collection (well, Alien 3 more for completeness’ sake). With the already high quality of DVD picture and sound, spending $25.99 for each of them on Blu-Ray would just feel wrong.

Of course, Blu-Ray could get an extra push from indie producers. More and more indie directors shooting on HD would mean an influx of content – some of which would be kept inexpensive to draw in new audiences, and which would help sell the new format to off-the-wall and indie film fans. Of course, it could provide this extra push – if Blu-Ray didn’t seem determined to exclude these producers from the new market.

Where are the POD solutions for Blu-Ray at this point? No, I’m seriously asking – where are they? CreateSpace, which is owned by Amazon, is still negotiating a deal to allow them to offer POD Blu-Ray. Kunaki? Lulu? Who knows? Neither one even mentions it. Why not?

It may have something to do with the $3,000-a-person entry fee the industry is imposing, otherwise known as the AACS DRM scheme. It appears that there’s been a real problem playing Blu-Ray discs that don’t include AACS, so everybody who wants to publish to the medium has to purchase an AACS license, and every title must include AACS – regardless of the wishes of the publisher and/or the artist.

Creative Commons-licensed material? Who cares? You’d better slap some copy protection on it.

Want to release a public domain film to Blu-Ray to help preserve our film history (or make a quick buck off of an HD release of The Last Man on Earth)? Sure. As long as that public domain film is one you’re willing to pay $3,000 to copy protect.

And forget about a sales system like EZTakes, that provides its DVD images DRM-free – but with the purchaser’s e-mail address embedded in the burnt copy.

Forget, too, about the share-friendly independent spirit that provokes legal statements like this one (found on my newest DVD, available soon, plug plug).

Low- and Micro-budget filmmakers will find themselves blocked out of the new next-generation disc market for as long as AACS is an expensive necessity and the artists are blocked out of making their own decisions as to how their content should be treated. The result? Well, unless the major studios wise up on their releasing schedule, a homogenized blend of movies nobody cares about seeing in High Definition, and a marketplace completely priced out of the range of the regular consumer.

After all, there’s one further aspect I’ve barely even touched on that is just as blocked by this current model – one could argue that DVD’s would never have become the consumer mainstay they are today if not for the bins of $1 DVD’s at the front of every major retail chain today…

As an artist whose music appears on Napster, you would think that somebody, somewhere, would have mentioned this to me. (Link via boing boing) Somebody, like, say, the company I pay to put my music on Napster. The same one that recently notified me that I may, in fact, have had my royalties collected without permission by SoundExchange, and that it was a good thing.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Napster Inc. begins selling MP3s Tuesday, a move the online music service hopes will lure iPod users and turn around Napster’s sliding fortunes.

The company is the latest to make the switch to the unrestricted file format, which makes it music tracks compatible with virtually any music player or other device.

Of course, I think it’s a great thing that Napster now sells my tracks DRM-free. I think DRM-free is the only way to go in digital downloads.

Still, don’cha think it would have been nice to be, y’know, notified?

Back when I worked tech suppor—err, “customer service,” one of the things we were told not to mess with was peoples’ sports. It didn’t matter if we were Steelers fans and the person on the line was a Packers fanatic, if we felt the Dodgers hadn’t been any good since they left Brooklyn and our customer was from L.A., or if we felt it was ridiculous to subscribe to the 15-channel Cricket Network. We did not comment on their sports choices.

I also learned very quickly that the most outraged and violently-inclined customers were the ones who – because of a problem with our product – would not be able to watch the sporting event they had been looking forward to. Thankfully, I only ever had to deal with regular season games – I quit the day before a massive Oscar De La Hoya pay-per-view, and people I went through training with told me later that I dodged a bullet by doing so.

So what is the MLB thinking – beyond “Here’s a way we can make greedy little fistfuls of extra cash” – when they tell their fans the games they bought from the MLB’s website can no longer be played? And furthermore, what are they thinking when they tell their customers that they can’t have their money back? [link via Boing Boing]

Just got off the phone with a MLB customer service supervisor.

“MLB no longer supports the DDS system” that it once used and so any CDs with downloaded games on them “are no good. They will not work with the current system.”

Great. Just effing great. ... As I told the supervisor, this is right in line with how wrong-headed and stupid and ass backwards MLB does everything.

I was told there is absolutely nothing MLB can do about these lost games. Plus, they said my purchases were all “one-time sales” and thus “there are no refunds”.

ahem.

And on a further note – don’t mess with peoples’ sports. They’ll kill you.