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Monday, October 10, 2005 |
Musicians tell Fans How to Beat Copy Protection.
In any security system, it's important to understand who the attacker is and who the defender is. In digital-media copy protection (usually called Digital Rights Management), it can get complicated.
The music industry has been selling the technology to everyone -- Congess, the public -- by claiming that they're defending the rights of musicians. But more and more musicians are realizing that their interests are better served by freely copyable music.
Now, in the most bizarre turn yet in the record industry's piracy struggles, stars Dave Matthews Band, Foo Fighters and Switchfoot -- and even Sony BMG, when the label gets complaints -- are telling fans how they can beat the system.
Read the whole article. [Schneier on Security]
11:04:33 PM 
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Robin cites EJ!
Hey Babe, You Look Like a Million Bucks (less).
Do the math. Former Lt. Gov of Massachusetts Evelyn Murphy and writer E.J. Graff have done the hard calculations in their book: ''Getting Even: Why Women Still Don't Get Paid Like Men--And What To Do About It."
It may seem like just a few cents, but the wage gap between men and women adds up to enormous sums over the course of a working lifetime. Women working fulltime earn 77 cents for every dollar earned by men. For a female college graduate, that's on average $1.2 million lost. For high school graduates it's $700,000 (which may have a more critical effect on their standard of living) and for women with a professional degree, it's $2 million. For the same work.
Much of the lag in pay and promotion has to do with unspoken attitudes, even attitudes that women hold. I love these charts that Murphy and Graff include in yesteday's Boston Globe op-ed. See if they resonate for you.
 
[Girl in the Locker Room!]
11:04:19 PM
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Dear Recording Industry: You're Being Had (Donna Wentworth).
The Cato Institute's Tim Lee offers counterintuitive advice for the record labels when they re-up their licensing agreements with Apple for iTunes: they should demand that Apple strip the DRM from the tunes.
How come? Because DRM isn't helping the labels sell music. It's helping a company (Apple) become the music industry's single gateway to the people who want to pay for music.
Thanks to DRM, a song downloaded at the iTunes Music Store will only play on iTunes or an iPod. That means that if a customer wants to start using different jukebox software or another MP3 player, he'll need to rebuild his music collection from scratch.
As Apple's share of the overall music market grows, it will be more and more difficult for you to walk away from the table during contract negotiations. Jobs will hold all the cards, because his customers--who form an ever-growing share of the music market--will be locked into his products. Like Bill Gates in the PC world, Steve Jobs will become the gatekeeper to tens of millions of music fans, and you will have to pay his price for admission.
How does ditching DRM help? If Apple's songs were distributed without copy protection, your customers would be able to switch to another program at any time. You could threaten to cut a deal with any of the other companies now clamoring for your business--Real, Napster, Sony, Microsoft, etc--and Jobs would know that his customers had the option of leaving his platform.
I know what you're thinking: what about piracy? The reality is that DRM does next to nothing to reduce piracy. Virtually every song ever recorded is already available on peer-to-peer networks. It's easy to "rip" a song from a CD (which has no protection at all), and Apple's DRM scheme has been repeatedly cracked. So people who don't respect the law aren't going to buy songs from the iTunes Music Store in the first place. DRM won't do a thing to stop them!
On the other hand, DRM systems treat your most honest customers like criminals. People who purchase music from the iTunes Music Store know perfectly well that they could get the same song for free via a peer-to-peer network. They choose to purchase from iTunes for one of two reasons: they value convenience or they respect the law. Either way, you don't need DRM to keep them honest. If they were inclined to engage in piracy, they wouldn't have bought the song in the first place.
[Copyfight]
10:57:07 PM
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