copy protection
Articles about copy protection:
This video captures Michael Masnick’s Learning From What’s Working: Success Stories From The Music Commerce Frontier.
Masnick is the founder of TechDirt – a technology blog that has been a vocal critic of the music industry’s approach to technology, especially DRM and its opposition to P2P file sharing.
You can safely skip the first 2 1/2 minutes – but the rest is must-view material for musicians.
Masnick relies way too much on the example of Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and other musicians that were established by the traditional music industry.
More interesting are Masnick’s examples of the creative and bizarre ways musicians are connecting with fan.
Give it a view and leave a comment with your thoughts!
Apple today launched iTunes Plus, offering DRM-free music tracks with 256 kbps AAC encoding, for audio quality almost as good as the original recordings, for just $1.29 per song.
iTunes Plus is launching with EMI’s digital catalog of recordings, including singles and albums from Coldplay, The Rolling Stones, Norah Jones, Frank Sinatra, Joss Stone, Pink Floyd, John Coltrane and more than a dozen of Paul McCartney’s classic albums available on iTunes for the first time.
iTunes will continue to offer its entire catalog, currently over five million songs, in the same versions as today—128 kbps AAC encoding with DRM—at the same price of 99 cents per song, alongside the higher quality iTunes Plus versions when available. In addition, iTunes customers can now easily upgrade their library of previously purchased EMI content to iTunes Plus tracks for just 30 cents a song and $3.00 for most albums.
“Our customers are very excited about the freedom and amazing sound quality of iTunes Plus,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We expect more than half of the songs on iTunes will be offered in iTunes Plus versions by the end of this year.” Read more…
Amazon.com today announced it will launch a digital music store later this year offering millions of songs in the DRM-free MP3 format from more than 12,000 record labels, including EMI. Every song and album in the Amazon.com digital music store will be available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software.Amazon’s announcement is the most promising prospect for an iTunes-killer. Amazon’s service will work with any player, Amazon already has a well-established business and audience, and Amazon’s content will be Web-based, instead of a proprietary interface like Apple’s iTunes.
Amazon’s DRM-free MP3s will let customers play their music on PCs, Macs, iPods, Zunes, Zens and burn songs to CDs for personal use.
“Our MP3-only strategy means all the music that customers buy on Amazon is always DRM-free and plays on any device,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder and CEO. “We’re excited to have EMI joining us in this effort and look forward to offering our customers MP3s from amazing artists like Coldplay, Norah Jones and Joss Stone.”
via Podcasting News
EMI has beat Apple to the punch, releasing The Good, The Bad & The Queen, an album by Gorillaz’ Damon Albarn’s latest supergroup as a DRM-free download.
It’s the first EMI album to be offered for legal download in mp3 format, free of copy protection.
For the first time, downloads by EMI artists purchased from any online music store will be playable on any digital music player, including iPods, with no technical restrictions on their use.
Green Fields, the latest single, and the full album, priced £7.99, are now available to download direct from the www.thegoodthebadandthequeen.com.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs posted a surprising statement on the company’s site yesterday, challenging the music industry to abandon DRM (copy protection) on digital music downloads.Jobs outlines three possible futures for digital music:
- Continue as is it is now, with each manufacturer competing freely with their own “top to bottom” proprietary systems for selling, playing and protecting music.
- Apple could license its FairPlay DRM technology to current and future competitors with the goal of achieving interoperability between different company’s players and music stores.
- Abolish DRMs entirely – according to Jobs, this is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.
