But since the lights went out I’ve never been the same

[venta]

Yesterday I had one of those moments where I realise I have a very specific opinion on something - but no real justification for it, and no clear idea where I got it from.

So, you, my dear self-selecting sample of guinea pigs, have the opportunity to prove me right. Or wrong. But I'm not going to tell you which is which. I'd hate to bias my otherwise-scientific survey.

I'm asking here about portable mp3 players (or mp3-a-likes). If you use your computer to play mp3s at you at home, or have some form of mp3 monster in the car, that's not what I meant.

[Poll #442057]

Comments

[snow-leopard.livejournal.com]

I have a Muvo from Creative. 304 songs in one tiny little box. Mmmm I love my Muvo.

[diffrentcolours]

I find the iPod interface very annoying. I prefer the interface of just about every player I've used.

And there's that whole Digital Restriction Management thing which means I won't be buying Apple any time soon.

[leathellin.livejournal.com]

ipods - about equally as good as the comparably priced players. So far I haven't found much of a functionality difference between my creative mini and a mini iPod. Oh, mine has an FM radio - big deal.
iTunes has started annoying me (it is what is on the Mac mini) but then the creative software also has its quirks.
The creative mini glows blue and comes in black - all very important :-)

[stegzy.livejournal.com]

I've got a Creative Jukebox 2 (10 gig). angelhands said "Why do you want one of those?" when I first ordered it. After a long journey round the south of England and round Wales its purpose became apparent. "Never ending music without having a car full of CD's or tapes!"

If I were to lose it today I would have to seal myself in a box until it was returned.....

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

Digital Restriction Management?

[triskellian]

(Need an ipod icon ;-)

"Some other things which I will comment about": I want to say "indispensable", but since I've only had it for a couple of weeks, it seems a bit much. Oh, and some sort of answer along the lines of "I already had an ibook and used itunes, so getting an mp3 player which didn't start with an i would've been daft".

And I was thinking to myself last night that I'd have to remember to make the following comment on your next entry, and that I'd have to apologise for it being OT, but it's actually not!

I was innocently driving along yesterday, with my ipod plugged into my car's cassette deck, playing my "bouncy" playlist on shuffle, when on came a song I didn't recognise, which confused me because I didn't think there were any such songs on my ipod. A moment later, all became clear: it was "Music for girls", from BAYD a few weeks back, and it's lovely. Hurrah for BAYD! And why was it absent last week?

[venta.livejournal.com]

(Need an ipod icon ;-)

Don't you mean iCon ?

:)

I'm glad to see Music For Girls getting the respect it deserves, and hurrah for it finding itself in a "bouncy" playlist :)

BAYD was absent last week on account of me being off sick on Friday. It hopes to make a triumphal return this week.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

It's like Digital Rights Management, which you can Google for, except that it approaches the purpose of DRM in a cynical manner pleasingly reminiscent of Orwell's use of "doublethink" to highlight certain tactics of the political class.

aliter: It's software designed to prevent you from using digital content in ways not approved by the copyright holder of that content.

[diffrentcolours]

The copy protection thing, which means you can't play AAC files from iTunes on non-iPod players. DRM is a bad idea for everybody - this article is quite a good read. Other effects include dodgy market pricing, unilateral restrictions on purchasing terms, shutting out competing music vendors, and locking you out from your "own" purchased music if your iBook has to be sent back for repair.

You can apparently buy some non-DRM tracks from iTunes, but I personally am not going to support a company which has such a huge investment in selling me restricted music while treating me like a criminal.

[diffrentcolours]

"I already had an ibook and used itunes, so getting an mp3 player which didn't start with an i would've been daft"

So an iBead or iRiver then? ;)

[diffrentcolours]

How is that good for society?

Anyway, pictures of your eye can be used to fake retinal scans... ;)

[diffrentcolours]

I am getting into the habit of listening to full albums more, though I still default to just listening on random.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

DRM is a bad idea for everybody

I don't entirely agree. Current implementations of DRM (by which I mean both the standards and the software which works with them) are terrible technically, ethically and probably legally. The biggest single problem is that DRM typically prevents (or rather, tries to prevent) many kinds of fair use. The second biggest problem is that if you have a bit of cunning and a screwdriver, no DRM technology on earth can prevent you from copying content illegally. So current DRM technology inconveniences the average user quite heavily, and the committed pirate not at all.

The fact that specific DRM technologies are being used by cynical corporations to lock customers (and their disposable income) into one provider is a property of IT in general rather than DRM in particular, and the usual issues all apply.

Where DRM stands out compared with other IT is that the rights holders want to make it as physically difficult as possible to specifically act to breach their licenses, and current DRM standards are driven solely by rights holders. The upshot of this is that they want to own the physical data channel all the way from microphone to eardrum, which is rather akin to a diamond merchant asserting that in order to prevent jewel heists, he demands the right to keep the entire population in handcuffs at all times. And that they have to pay for their own handcuffs, which furthermore must be of a design on which he holds several key patents. Criminals, of course, own their own boltcutters.

On the plus side, many users are quite willing to moderate their illegal activities, and are also quite willing to hand over a certain amount of money to artists, provided that the user considers the amount to be reasonable for what they get. As such, a lot of the principles of DRM are quite useful. For example: informing the user of the license under which they are acquiring content; enforcing that license in the absence of specific action by the user to breach it; associating with the content itself a means of paying for a license for that content; and standards which recognise common types of fair use and permit it in the absence of specific action by the rights holder to prevent it.

[diffrentcolours]

I'm not sure why you think that your "principles of DRM" are principles of DRM, or even implemented in practice. Displaying the license of a piece of software as a click-through thing was standard practice before DRM. Having terms and conditions on mp3 download sites still happens. There are various ways of providing metadata with content (such as a URL field in an mp3 or Ogg Vorbis file) which provides the user with a way of paying for the content. There are projects like Creative Commons to encourage common types of fair use without DRM.

To go back to your example with the diamond merchant, the attitude of many people seems to be "well, I have to wear these handcuffs, but I have boltcutters so it's OK", which ignores the encroaching legislation to make boltcutters themselves illegal.

I really can't see a situation where a DRM solution is (a) better than a non-DRM solution and (b) not outweighed by the downsides and abuses of DRM.

[triskellian]

:-P

(Damnit. Forgot about iRiver and didn't know about iBead.)

[narenek.livejournal.com]

I currently listen to complete albums. I keep meaning to put together some playlists (the absolute requisite is a "Bouncy" playlist to help keep one awake when driving at night) but suspect that I'll want to keep listening to albums because I generally considered them as complete works rather than a sequence of individual tunes.

[condign.livejournal.com]

It's worth noting inter alia that DRM may be responsible for the IPod's continuing existence. IPods are massive in size, and very very few customers have 40GB of legally-acquired content. ITunes represents one line of defense against IPods being an infringing technology. The RIAA has made a couple of shots across the bow at Apple, claiming that the IPod encourages non-fair-use copying. Lacking some way to legitimately buy rights-managed content, the case would be much stronger.

[wimble.livejournal.com]

My Muvo is only 128 Meg, which comes to about 40 to 60 tracks. So it's easier to punt entire albums to it than pick up a selection of tracks. Another example of my putting off the decision making (ooh, should I have track 3 or track 6 off this album?) :)

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

I [heart] shuffle mode. Why should I suffer for someone else's art?

[kauket.livejournal.com]

Actually the FM radio would be the thing to sell it to me, if the prices were the same. I like XFM, I have no means of hearing it when I travel.

But then I have no music when I travel because I am poor.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure why you think that your "principles of DRM" are principles of DRM

Because of what DRM is - namely a rights description language coupled with semantics for media software to enforce the restrictions expressed using the language, and some kind of encryption to obfuscate the content so that non-compliant software has to work its ass off to get a look-in. I'm fairly confident that's the industry-standard definition.

Displaying the license of a piece of software as a click-through thing was standard practice before DRM

However, it wasn't standard practice for movie or audio clips, and the license was not encoded using a semantic markup which user agents could understand and implement - it is solely up to the user to work out for himself whether or not he is abiding by the terms of the license, which is ridiculous when you consider that most such licenses are (a) very wordy and (b) almost identical.

It is a principle of DRM because the licensing restrictions are precisely the information conveyed by the rights language. Whether a particular agent actually displays them is of course a slightly different matter.

Having terms and conditions on mp3 download sites still happens

Those TaC statements aren't associated with the content, they're associated with the site. This means that they don't travel with the content, an issue which has become a serious drawback in the last few years now that file sharing is a significant reality. DRM typically associates the rights (or means of acquiring them) with the content in some kind of container.

There are various ways of providing metadata with content (such as a URL field in an mp3 or Ogg Vorbis file)

That doesn't provide a very rich rights-description markup, and there are 0 media players which will check the specified URL and, if it indicates that the content may not be played without permission, ask the user whether they wish to buy that permission. There is of course the "copyright" bit in mp3, which again is not a terribly rich language, which is generally ignored, and which if it wasn't trivially ignorable would in fact be DRM (of a very rudimentary kind).

There are projects like Creative Commons to encourage common types of fair use without DRM.

Creative Commons really isn't very useful for people who want to make money by selling content, because the most restrictive license it offers still allows licensees to redistribute the entire thing with no royalty payments. If you believe that people should not be permitted to make money by charging royalties for the use of IP, then that's a perfectly respectable belief to hold, but to assert that a solution based on that belief can solve current IP issues is very optimistic indeed.

Ultimately, CC is not about "fair use" in the current legal definition of the term, it defines a new set of things and asserts axiomatically that these are the things which CC will consider to be fair. It then does so.

DRM does a similar thing, where the content provider defines what is fair use, and permits that through granted rights. The allowed rights are typically more restrictive than the current legal definition of "fair use", which is why current use of DRM is more evil than CC, but that is not an essential property of a rights-restricted object. The principle is that the content provider gets to say what they are prepared to allow, and the user must abide by that in order to stay within the system. As you point out, this principle is also present in CC, so it is not unique to DRM, but it certainly is one of the primary motivations of DRM. What would be nice would be a rights language in which well-known kinds of fair use were easily expressed and protected. This is a function of who it is that gets to defined the language, provider or consumer.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

I really can't see a situation where a DRM solution is (a) better than a non-DRM solution and (b) not outweighed by the downsides and abuses of DRM.

A hypothetical situation, or one likely to happen in the next few years? If you mean the latter, then I reiterate my original comment that current DRM standards and implementations suck. They're currently just a blunt tool for enforcement of copyright restrictions, not a means to inform users of their rights and responsibilities as defined in law.

If the former, then consider a rights description language which is open, unencumbered by patent, and which copyright owners can attach to a piece of content in order to unambiguously inform content users what they can and can't do. So far, we have Creative Commons licensing, which you seem to support. Now extend the language to describe a more complete set of everyday copyright situations, ("you may play this game free either three times for for two hours, whichever happens first, then here's the URL at which to cough up your dough to keep playing"), rather than only those consistent with a particular ideology, and implement it in software so that your user agent pops up a dialog saying "you are about to commit a copyright infringement. Continue? [Make it legal] [Abort] [Continue] [Always break the law for this content]". Of course the latter two options will be greyed out if you're fool enough to use hardware owned by The Man, or if you compiled with LAW_ABIDING_CITIZEN=true, but that's your lookout.

What's your objection?

[smiorgan.livejournal.com]

The RIAA has made a couple of shots across the bow at Apple, claiming that the IPod encourages non-fair-use copying

Let's not forget monkey-boy Ballmer calling all iPod owners thieves.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

very very few customers have 40GB of legally-acquired content.

Does iPod play .wav files? If so, then 40GB of legally-acquired content represents only about 80-100 audio CDs. That's not much.

Furthermore, an iPod is a portable USB hard disk (and indeed I use my non-iPod player for carting large files about the place). If a court ever rules that nobody needs as much as 40GB of digital storage for legal purposes, then I will happily call that judge a fuckwit.

This is not to say that the case in question won't be ruled by a fuckwit, merely that when the government becomes sufficiently fuckwitted, we are entitled to start ignoring their dumbass opinions.

[smiorgan.livejournal.com]

If you're likely to want interoperability between the devices you're no more likely to choose DRM'd AAC than .ogg. iPod plays mp3 just fine, I have a 30 Gb collection (legal!) and have never bought anything from the iTunes store. DRM's irrelevent as far as day-to-day use of the iPod goes.