DRM sounds harmless enough. “Digital Rights Management” is what it stands for and that still doesn’t sound that bad. But the implications of what it means are downright scary. By “Rights Management” what the people creating this stuff mean, is taking your rights away from you and giving themselves more rights over you.

Want to play your newly purchased CD in your car? Buy a new “DRM friendly” car stereo or just listed to the radio. Want to record a TV show to your hard drive and then burn it to disk for your personal watching pleasure? Too bad, wait till they release it on DVD and buy it, or do without. Want to make a plain Jane non DRM music CD so you can use your old CD walkman when you go jogging? Sorry guys, go and buy an MP3 player like good little consumers.

Not all of the above are in place yet, but we are definitely moving in that direction. In some ways, I think the content providers like the Hollywood mafia and the recording industry must be wetting themselves with excitement. It is so much easier to screw with the users rights in digital form that it was with good old analogue.

I suggest anyone interested in their rights as consumers read this article on TheInquirer. Until they figure out how to make line out ports illegal, I suggest you make your “fair use” copies of legally bought DRM music the old fashioned way, by putting the disk into a hardware player with a line out port, and plugging that into a PC’s (or any recorders) line in port and record it that way, DRM makes absolutely no difference in that respect at all. Sure, you lose a tiny bit of quality, but more often then not, you lose more quality by encoding it for your DRM player anyway.

Most important of all, don’t let the marketing might of this lot convince you that the DRM “Rights Management” is wonderful, and for your own benefit. It is not for you, it’s not even for the artists really. It’s for the record companies, and the Hollywood mafia. If it really was for the benefit of all, why are they actually taking more rights away from us then what we had in the analogue VHS/Tape/pre DRM CD era? We used to be able to buy a double deck cassette player for practically nothing and make copies of our stuff so we had one to keep in the car collection, or so we wouldn’t lose our purchase if the product failed (a modern equivalent would be a hard drive failure) We used to be able to tape a TV show and archive the tape for our personal pleasure. It is these very rights that we will be losing should this bunch of greedy extortionists convince the general public that it’s for “your own good”.

Use your power as consumers to stay away from DRM content as much as you possibly can, because if they discover that they can pull the rug over your eyes, you can be sure that in a very short period of time personal rights to legally purchased content will be something we tell our kids about in fond reminiscence.

Regards

Franki

I am considering adding Mike Davidson to my personal list of web/html heros. He has something called sIFR (flash replacement of text so a nicer anti-aliased font can be used). Or as he puts it: Introducing sIFR, The Healthy Alternative to Browser Text.

I think I will try playing with this. If I understand it right, and I have to admit it is presented in a way that makes it a little hard for us slow people to follow, you have your text, use his engine to export your text, and it is embedded as a swf file.

This article is a must read! This guy Mike Davidson just participated in a major redesign of the ABC News Site. The breadth and wisdom is so significant that I have included this post in six of my blog categories (general, web design, css, html, news, rss).

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CSS on the fly at this site. You can try various layouts via drop down and radio buttons and the css is generated for you.

In an effort to stop Europe from following the US into patent depravity, a new site has been launched to try and co-ordinate efforts to lobby against software patent adoption from being put into place in the European Union.

Patent wars are only a possibility for companies with very deep pockets, as has recently been demonstraited by Sun’s payout to Kodak of 92 million US dollars. The question to be asked, is what happens to small developers and Open Source groups? If companies are allowed to patent basic software building blocks, then you will eventually not be able to write anything without stepping on somebody else’s toes patent wise. Which means that you either have to have millions, or you have to work for one of the big companies, or you have to find another occupation.

The new site http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com has the backing of some significant companies, not the least of which is ZDNET.

Any of my readers in Europe should really write to their local members about this, because if it goes though, you can expect the cost of software to rise as well. After all, if you have to pay millions of dollars to licence patented ideas, you’re going to pass that cost on to your customers aren’t you?

While you’re out browsing, you might also want to check out protectinnovation.ffii.org.uk as well.

Regards

Franki

Reading this article on news.com I found myself somewhat surprised. It seems we may soon start buying our music on memory cards rather then CD’s or DVD’s. I was surprised not that it has happened, but that it has happened so soon. I didn’t think the market would be ready for such a thing for a couple of years yet.

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AMD has recently released 2 new high end CPU’s (Central Processing Unit) otherwise known as the brain of your PC. The AMD64 4000+ and the FX-55, the former being the consumer CPU of choice and the latter being the high end workstation and heavy duty gamer choice.

Every test I’ve read, (and that’s been a few, as I’ve long been an avid AMD fan) has stated that the new AMD CPU’s totally trounces anything Intel has released or seems likely to release in the next 6 months (at the very least). In fact several of the tests I read were clear on the fact that the AMD chips even beat the Intel CPU’s when they are over clocked to their maximum, and this is while running 32 bit applications when WinXP64 is released, it will pull ahead even further ahead.

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