Items tagged with DRM
Astoundingly, it looks like the darkest DRM days are behind us. As more and more companies digest the fact that DRM only hurts the legitimate buyers and gives pirates even more incentive to plunder for illicit bounty, we're seeing the DRM shackles removed from music stores across the web. The latest major company to cast aside the chains...
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At this year's Macworld, Apple announced iTunes was (finally) going DRM-less. However, if you wanted to remove the DRM from your pre-existing iTunes library, it was all or nothing. Proving that they do listen , Apple has changed things, and you can now upgrade your music to iTunes Plus (AKA DRM-free) one song at a time. If you go to the iTunes...
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To DRM or not to DRM, that is the question. (For the uninitiated, DRM stands for digital rights management, and it is a means publishers use to restrict users from making unlicensed copies of software and other digital media--in essence, it is copy protection.) On the one hand, DRM limits the ability of casual users from making copies of media...
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Spore is not only a retail hit, it's a BitTorrent hit, according to a recent top 10 assessment of PC game piracy by TorrentFreak. Spore's SecuROM DRM earned it negative customer reviews at Amazon.com, protest Spore creatures, as well as lawsuits. According to TorrentFreak (and honestly, many others), it also earned the game a ton of pirated...
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Spore is a critically-acclaimed game, but (at least by users) its DRM has been universally panned. Many of those who know anything about the SecuROM copy protection used in the game don't want it near their computers, unless they absolutely have to. And while Electronic Arts (EA) has "loosened things up" slightly, the DRM has spawned thousands...
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Spore's rather draconian DRM, which besides being the already hated SecuROM limits the user to 3 installs and only one online account per CD key, has fostered extremely bad user reviews on Amazon.com as well as "protest creatures." At least part of that DRM will get loosened up soon, via a patch, according to reports. When asked by MTV's Multiplayer...
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Don't expect this issue to go away anytime soon. We know many are (understandably) upset over the DRM used on the critically-acclaimed game Spore, not just because of SecuROM but also because of the "three activations limitation" and one account per CD key (which was not noted in the manual; in fact the opposite was said in the manual!). And...
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What would be the ideal form of DRM? Besides, obviously, no DRM, copy protection that's industry-wide, so that you could snag something from one store or retailer and play it on any player, whether it be a Zune or an iPod, or even your DVD player, would be the dream of consumers. While piracy is the bane of the industry, the fact...
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The trend towards DRM-free music seems to be giving Dell the notion that the market's ready for another digital music player. They tried to sell MP3 players five years ago, but got washed away in the Apple iPod tsunami and gave up in 2006. There's a whiff of "me too" about anybody trying to make portable music players now; Apple's devices...
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As though we need still another reason to hate DRM, here comes one. Remember the now-defunct MSN Music store? Hopefully you weren't one of the few to use it.Customers who have purchased music from Microsoft's now-defunct MSN Music store are now facing a decision they never anticipated making: commit to which computers (and OS)...
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April 15th is not my favorite day of the year. I doubt it's yours, either. But the IRS is not the only acronym you need to start worrying about on that date. This year, your DirecTV digital video recorder will be getting the DRM treatment for pay-per-view content on April 15th. The days of recording and watching entirely at your leisure are...
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Like Basil Fawlty telling everybody not to mention The War, while doing it himself over and over, Microsoft has a new media playback protocol called PlayReady, and it's not a DRM platform! You could waterboard a Microsoft executive but he won't utter the acronym. Don't mention the DRM platform!PlayReady has some interesting features that might...
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In a major coup, Amazon.com announced Thursday that by the end of January you'll be able to download MP3 versions of Sony BMG music from their DRM-free Amazon MP3 store. Thus officially dies DRM."We are excited to offer Amazon MP3 customers DRM-free MP3s from SONY BMG, which represents many of the most popular musicians from the past and present....
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Sony has confirmed what was rumored last week: DRM-free downloads are coming. The silly part is you have to go to a retail brick-and-mortar store first.The No. 2 record company after Universal Music will sell plastic cards, called Platinum MusicPass, for individual albums for a suggested price of $12.99. Buyers enter a code from the...
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It wasn't all that long ago that online music vendors starting selling DRM-free tracks, often at a small premium and/or small loss of audio fidelity. At the time it was viewed by some as a marketing experiment to see if people would pay more to avoid headaches related to Digital Rights Management, and now it appears that there...
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Internet retail giant Amazon.com today launched its "Amazon MP3" digital music download service. The 2 million songs available come without Digital Rights Management restrictions, and will play on most any device that can handle a sound file. Most songs are priced from 89 cents to 99 cents, with more than 1 million of the...
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This week the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) released a report which investigated DRM used in 16 different products and services. The conclusion was that many DRM technologies fail to comply with basic requirements of Canadian privacy law.The study, published by the University of Ottawa’s Canadian Internet Policy...
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SpiralFrog, a free online music download service, launches today. The service hopes to make a go of it with the holy grail of RIAA haters -- ad-supported free music downloads. Founder Joe Mohen predicts they'll need 10 million users per month to make enough money to pay the licensing fees on the music. Is it really that hard to give away free...
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Wal-Mart has joined the likes of Amazon.com and iTunes today - it is offering MP3 downloads, free of DRM. Much as it's hard to applaud anything Wal-Mart does, it is a major step when the world's largest retailer signs up. Wal-Mart announces the launch of "DRM-free" MP3 music downloads, now available online at http://www.walmart.com. At...
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Perhaps signalling another nail in the coffin of DRM, Universal Music Group has announced that it will begin a test program of DRM-free music sales, starting August 21st and lasting through January 31st of next year. Surprisingly, the songs will not be available through iTunes, which has already been selling DRM-free music from EMI, though...
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Now that Apple is offering some of its content DRM free users are finding that their names and email addresses are being added to the file details! Here's a snippet from Wired: "Earlier this week, Apple iTunes 7.2 brought the new ability to download tracks from EMI Records without copy protection. But the unprotected files are labeled with...
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The music industry's answer to music piracy is DRM(Digital Rights Management) software. While many record labels claim it's necessary to combat piracy, there's a growing number of consumers that feel it infringes on their rights as customers, keeping them from listening to their tunes on any device they wish. In an effort...
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