
The day the music died - mqt
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2008/05/06/the-day-the-music-died
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baha_man
Good article, I particularly liked these parts:

'Bruce Schneier, a famous cryptologist — or at least as famous a cryptologist
as cryptologists are likely to get in this century — once described attempts
to make digital bits uncopyable as “trying to make water not wet.”'

and

'Tom Lehrer’s description of folk singers as “the people who get up on stage
and come out in favor of all the things that everyone else in the audience is
against, like peace and justice and brotherhood and so on”'.

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raganwald
> 'Tom Lehrer’s description of folk singers as “the people who get up on stage
> and come out in favor of all the things that everyone else in the audience
> is against, like peace and justice and brotherhood and so on”'.

This second bit made me think of people like RMS.

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TrevorJ
I love this quote from the story. "Apple calls these songs “iTunes Plus”,
because it sounds so much better than calling everything else “iTunes Minus.”"

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immad
Good comment in post: "I feel terrible for all the 26 people who bought
PlaysForSuren’t songs :-)"

Reflects my feelings too. It seems like if enough people cared MS would just
keep one of those servers running...

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noonespecial
Oh well, the 18 people who bought "Bob" tried to warn them...

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lisper
I really think that Microsoft customers must have some kind of Stockholm-
syndrome thing going on in their brains. This is not the first time Microsoft
has screwed its customers, and it won't be the last. And yet, for reasons
passing my understanding, people keep coming back for more.

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mironathetin
Very amusing story!

I know two solutions for the problem:

One is, don't buy drm'd music (and movies!) - we all knew that.

The other is, immediately play the music, send it with audio out to your
stereo and through audio in back to the computer and record it. This limits
the fun and is boring work, but then the music will be 100% drm free.

As for europe, this is even legal, because you don't break drm and recording
comes with a quality loss (depending on your stereo and soundcard) - means,
its not a copy.

Hm..., maybe 1 is the better solution...

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brfox
The license on playsforsure lets you just burn the music to CD for playing in
your normal CD player. Then you could re-rip it in FLAC or something lossless.
I think that re-ripping back to a lossy format ends up being double bad when
you burn from a compressed file to start with. Alternatively, you can just
remove the DRM: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Media_DRM#Removal>

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mironathetin
"Alternatively, you can just remove the DRM:"

yes, you can, but thats illegal. I was thinking about a legal way.

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goodkarma
This is one of many examples of a company that has grown so big that they
could care less about their customers and the user experience.

Who are Microsoft's customers, and why do they continue to tolerate this sort
of thing? Do they just not know any better?

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apu
Can't the exact same thing be asked of people who purchase DRMed music from
Apple's iTunes Store? What makes Apple less evil than Microsoft?

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cstejerean
It can happen to iTunes customers. The difference is Apple is continuing to
support the songs they sold whereas Microsoft is backing out of its former
promise to let consumers play the songs for as long as they own the devices.

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Xichekolas
But Apple is continuing to support their songs because the iTunes store is
profitable at the moment. What happens if all the labels decide to pull their
content and offer their own service? Suddenly Apple might not be so willing.

Does iTunes do the same dial home approach? If not, the point may be moot.

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cstejerean
it does when you authorize a new computer. But apple makes it incredibly east
to migrate your data either from old computer to new or from time machine
backup. And I wouldn't be surprised if it synced iTunes authorization keys to
.mac

Even if Apple shuts down the iTunes store I expect them to keep up the
authorization server as long as possible.

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mattmaroon
Good post, and great writing. I owned a few Plays For Sure players (great ones
too, actually) but never bought any DRMed tracks. I did use the time-based DRM
(Rhapsody To Go), with which at least it was understood from the get go that
you were renting the music.

Unfortunately even that didn't work very well, so I gave up on it rapidly. At
least in my experience most of the other people who had those players didn't
bother purchasing DRMed tracks.

I wonder why MSFT doesn't just give customers the same track for free with no
DRM. It wouldn't be that expensive for them, and would foster some serious
good will, whereas their current position will do the opposite.

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melvinram
People actually bought music from MSN Music?

