The last of the major labels finally throws in the towel on DRM, and prepares to fight Apple for valuable download revenues
As we reported Friday, the looming royalty crunch on Internet radio that would have begun today (July 15) was narrowly averted last week by a temporary reprieve from SoundExchange. Now it appears that a lasting compromise is indeed possible, but such a compromise will likely mean mandatory DRM for Internet radio.
This program will let you use the music you legally bought the way you should be able to.
People don’t like DRM, perhaps that’s just because it’s such a smelly word. HBO’s chief technology officer Bob Zitter thinks so, he wants to ditch the term DRM in favor of “DCE,” or, “Digital Consumer Enablement.” HBO’s top techie said the new term would better describe all the peachy ways that DRM… er, DCE could be used.
What is it they say about history? Those that don’t know it are going to look really clueless when they repeat it? Something like that. AACS, meet DeCSS. DeCSS, meet your latest imitator.
“Microsoft says that it’s dropping DRM from some of the catalog in the Zune store. This is the other shoe-drop we’ve all been waiting for since Apple announced last week that it would sell the entire EMI catalog (albeit at a 30% higher price) without DRM through the iTunes Music Store…”
With Vista sales completely lagging, and Steve Jobs being nice, and Google trying not to be as evil, it looks like something the RIAA is losing supporters faster than Alberto Gonzales.
GUI version and library conversion routines by ATOM_alac. Support for iTunes 7.0.1 and 7.0.2. Fast dumping for iTunes 7.x. Patch offsets are now specified in an external file. Invalid m4a files which were sometimes produced by 2.4 are now detected and reconverted. List of protected files is now retrieved from the XML library file.
read more | digg story
Last week at the Digital Home Developers Conference Brad Hunt, the MPAA’s executive vice president and chief technology officer said that piracy is the inevitable outcome of the music and movie industries’ inability to provide a simple, inter-compatible and non-intrusive DRM solution.