Digital Rights Management

The Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA, is infamous (or, depending on how you look at it, famous) for its prosecution of regular folk for downloading and ripping music onto personal computers. However, now it seems that the ... organization is willing to admit that their most notorious form of copy protection, DRM, is dead. DRM, or Digital Rights Management, has been used for years to protect legitimate artists from piracy. For a long time, a band and its record company could use DRM technology to prevent the end user from passing an album or a song from computer to computer. The ... (view more)

Apple has announced it will no longer use Digital Rights Management (DRM) copy protection on songs sold through iTunes. The firm also announced prices for individual tracks will vary depending on publisher demands. So far, almost all songs have ... retailed for a fixed rate of 99 cents. That price has upset some record labels which feel their tracks would still sell at a higher price, to the point that overall revenue (split with Apple) would also be higher. The new system will see songs priced at 69 cents, 99 cents or $1.29. (Source: cnn.com ) The new pricing takes effect in April, when Apple ... (view more)

Recently, the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) stated it would no longer pursue its fruitless strategy of prosecuting individuals for copyright infringement . Instead, it plans to put more pressure on Internet Service Providers (ISPs) ... for weeding out high-bandwidth downloaders. Well, now ISPs have responded to that pressure by berating the RIAA for ignoring the expensive costs Internet providers must incur to pursue suspected peer-to-peer downloaders. Granted, although finding and shutting off downloaders saves ISPs necessary bandwidth space, the hunt is not a cheap one. The ... (view more)

Norway's leading consumer advocate wants to bring down Apple's "walled garden" between the iPod music player and the iTunes online retail store. Bjorn Erik Thon, Norway's consumer ombudsman, says he is going to ask the country's Market Council -- a ... court that has legal authority to make companies change their business practices -- to force Apple to allow competition within the iTunes-iPod ecosphere. (Source: guardian.co.uk ) Currently, Apple's iPod is the only portable device that can sync with iTunes and the iTunes store. Since its launch in 2003, The iTunes Store, Apple's online retail arm ... (view more)

SanDisk has teamed up with the four major record labels to offer legal music sales in a new format: memory cards. The scheme, dubbed SlotMusic, uses the MicroSD format, meaning many buyers will be able to listen to the music directly through their ... cell phones. There'll also be a USB adaptor for plugging the card into a computer. The main selling point of the system is that the music files will have no digital rights management (the copy protection system which heavily restricts usage of many downloadable albums) and that it will be encoded at 320 kilobytes per second. That's a better quality ... (view more)

A consortium of Hollywood studios, retailers, service providers and other tech companies are banding together to liberalize digital media while still retaining property rights. Called the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), the group's ... basic premise is to give users the ability to store digital content remotely and access it anywhere across multiple platforms including home-based and portable players. DECE members are hoping their plan will replace the "ease and comfort" that users now experience with DVDs. (Source: reuters.com ) Of course, in a digital world the rules are a ... (view more)

A music service run by MTV and the creators of RealPlayer is launching a digital download store that could be the most credible challenger yet to Apple's iTunes store. Rhapsody America offers five million songs in MP3 format and mirrors the iTunes ... pricing structure of 99c per track and $9.99 per album. But unlike iTunes, the songs are available without the shackles of Digital Rights Management. That's a restriction designed to fight piracy by limiting or preventing users from copying the file to multiple computers or handheld devices. Rhapsody has signed deals with all four major record ... (view more)

Some users of Windows Vista Media Center have been reportedly blocked from recording some NBC Universal TV shows, receiving error messages that read "restrictions set by the broadcaster and/or originator prohibit recording of this program" instead. ... One person prevented from recording the NBC shows is an IT director in Northern California who says this is indicative of why the current Digital Rights Management (DRM) schemes are flawed. DRM schemes affect people who intend to legally consume content, with no intention of stealing the content. People intent on stealing content already have ways ... (view more)

According to reports, Napster has now launched what it describes as the world's "largest and most comprehensive MP3 store at www.napster.com/store ." Boasting a massive library and most importantly DRM-free music, the formerly illegal but now very ... law-abiding download site has an edge in its battle with online music retail goliath iTunes. Though its prices aren't drastically different than its major rival (songs are 99 cents each and just under ten bucks for MP3 albums), almost the entire Napster library is free of that wonderfully-frustrating DRM. For those that haven't heard, DRM (Digital ... (view more)

Wal-Mart's online store has undergone a major redesign that makes its massive catalogue of songs entirely DRM-free. Digital rights management (DRM) is a term used to identify restrictions placed on digital media to prevent piracy. Wal-Mart's online ... store had previously made use of the Windows Media DRM, limiting the playback of songs to devices sanctioned by Microsoft. However, the growing popularity of mobile media devices such as the iPod, which cannot play songs limited to the Windows Media DRM, has forced the retailer to carry out a complete switch-over. Wal-Mart had announced its ... (view more)