35 Days Against DRM

This is interesting. Defective by Design is hosting 35 days against DRM, during which they will pick a product that everyone should boycott in order to speak their mind about how much they think DRM sucks.

Their first product, sadly enough, is the new Macbook.

Why am I not surprised that they’ve targeted Apple?

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Two Largest Judgments in RIAA Cases were Against the RIAA.

Okay… this is just great. I know I’ve been quiet other than sharing news about my car, and my escapades with my car, but really… this had to be shared.

107,951$ in judgment against the RIAA in Atlantic v. Anderson. It’s about friggin’ time!

And note that the MSM is completely ignoring this news! There is no word of this on the front page of Google at all.

And yet another idiot files a lawsuit…

Come on people! iTunes will gladly let you put DRM free mp3′s from other services on board its device. If you’ve got a problem with WMA files, stop downloading them! Microsoft is only pulling the WMA thing because they want you to buy a Zune.

This lady’s claim has some serious issues that anyone who understands this technology will look at and see immediately. In fact, the majority of her claims are so laughable that it’s the only reason I bothered to share the article at all. If she gets a judge who bothers to keep up on technology at all, I fully expect that he (or she) will laugh this woman out of the court room.

Read the article and get a good laugh. This isn’t the first time that someone has filed against Apple for violations of the Sherman Anti-Trust act, and I doubt it will be the last, but it certainly is the dumbest I have seen by far.

It begins.

Oh the bad, bad thing that I have started this morning.

Today, I downloaded my first song from iTunes. I know that this is the start of an ongoing trend. Periodically, I’ll get songs stuck in my head, and on a whim I’ll go download them. It’s far too easy to do. I just have a certain amount of guilt over the particular song I chose to download today. It was a pop song, I mean come on… what was I thinking?

Watch the video on youtube, and feel free to laugh.

Unwritten – Natasha Bedingfield.

A Music Lover’s Response to Rolling Stone.

On the 19th of this month, Rolling Stone released an article which discussed the decline of the recorded music business, and attempted to analyze it’s fall.

Much of this article makes complete sense and it is precisely what many music lovers have been saying since the RIAA filed its original lawsuit against Napster. Give us digital music. Do not tell us how we will listen to music that we pay for the right to listen to, we will decide that for ourselves, thanks. Do give us a better way to fill our lives with music at a price that makes sense.

Note what I said there: Pay for the right. Most people believe that when they pay for something, that means they own it. Now, obviously I don’t have the right to release tons of copies of James Blunt’s latest CD and make money off of them… but *I* do have the right to listen to the CD because I paid money for it! And if I want to listen to it on my iPod, or in my car or as a ringtone on my cell phone, why should anyone else care? I paid for it and that means that I should get to choose how I listen to it.

That is what music lovers believe they have purchased when they buy a cd or download a song off iTunes, and the music industry has never been able to wrap their head around it and it’s only part of why their business is failing.

The other reason why they are failing is because of people like me.

I have been desperate to find CDs to blow my money on, but I can’t justify spending my money on the latest pop act. My teenagers don’t even listen to that bubblegum crap. The last CD I bought was originally released in 1999 (Powerman 5000′s Tonight The Stars Revolt), and I purchased that CD a few days ago. The other two CDs I bought with it were both released in 1991. The most recently released CD that I purchased for myself was an anime soundtrack. Before that… I picked up a copy of The Rolling Stones 40 Licks, and The Beatles 1. Why? Because these CDs have good music and I was guaranteed to not get ripped off.

I purchased a CD not that long ago by Evanescence. I was in love with “Bring Me to Life” until the radio overplayed it so much that I stopped turning on the radio in my car so I could avoid listening to the damned song. The rest of the CD… was a waste of my money. I never listen to anything else off of it. I spent 15$ on a CD so I could listen to 1 song. This is how it goes with every CD that I have purchased that is not at least 7 years old.

As a result of my experience with purchasing music from new acts, phrases like this one at the end of the Rolling Stone article… simply blow me away: “We have great records, but we’re less sure than ever that people are going to buy them,”

Let me put this into perspective for you guys as a music lover who listens to her iPod every single day: If the recording industry had great records, I would buy them!

I would not be importing CDs from Japan! I would be walking into Wal-mart or Best Buy, or I would actually sign up for an iTunes account because there would be music that I would want to spend my money on available to me… but there isn’t! What I would want to spend my money on, I already own on CD because it’s been around for ten years.

Music right now… is shit, and when the occasional rare gem comes along, it is destroyed within weeks by radio stations overplaying songs to death. I can’t blame the DJs for that, even though I know computers do most of the DJ’ing for them… good music is hard to find, especially in this day and age.

The Silence Must Be Heard!

Ian C. Rogers, General Manager of LaunchCast has posted an open letter to users of LaunchCast about why it is that Yahoo! decided to take the service offline for today. It explains the complete history of the process that is the rate hike that will put Internet Radio Stations out of business.

Read it, then write your representatives! Save Net Radio!

Save Net Radio: The Day of Silence

I don’t think that people should get something for nothing, unless the net value of said item is, in fact, nothing. However, this is ridiculous and the RIAA should be slapped for this.

Tomorrow, the majority of major internet radio stations will be going offline to protest a rate increase that goes in effect on July 1st, which is retroactive to January 2006. This rate increase will destroy these small, blossoming businesses before they even have the chance to get off the ground.

The reality of this is, the RIAA wants to control how you receive your music and if it doesn’t meet with their known methods of control, they will find a Senator who will legislate that method out of business for them.

Do the right thing: Save Net Radio

iPod vs. Zune

This is an interesting article from a current iPod owner on why he will switch to a Zune when microsoft releases the device.

What I find most amusing about this, is that a lot of his complaints are a large portion of why I chose not to buy another Sony music player. SonicStage had all of the same problems that this guy complains about with iTunes. It was cumbersome, image heavy, took forever to convert things and periodically, for whatever random reason, chose to delete files from my music collection when I would burn them to minidisc. It was never a whole album either, and never all of the songs that I’d transferred onto one particular disc in one sitting, so I wouldn’t call it a user error. Also, when my hard drive went belly up, I had no way to get those songs back off of the minidisc and onto my hard drive again.

What I quickly found out, is that this is simply life living with tunes that have been crippled with DRM. This is not what I want as a consumer. I want the ability to put it on my player, take it back off and not lose the music that I’ve paid for. My solution to the SonicStage problem was to buy hard copies, rip them and then transfer them to my player. This way I am guaranteed that I won’t lose my entire music collection from a single hard drive failure, and have the ability to restore the music– that I paid to have the right to listen to– on that machine.

Also, he’s right, it’s cheaper to buy CDs, particularly when your music tastes tend to not include Ashlee Simpson or Christina Aguilera. I’m not a pop music kind of girl. I stopped being a pop music kind of girl when I was 12. Can we please grow up the available music selection to things that stretch outside of American pop culture? I know this stuff sells, but the other stuff will sell too and how hard would it be to carry the more obscure tunes realistically when each one only takes up a few megabytes of hard drive space? I’m not expecting iTunes to carry j-pop, but it would be nice to be able to find something that doesn’t make me feel the need to crack my gum when I listen to it.

The 95 Theses of Geek Activism

This is an interesting set of theses for geeks. A lot of the ideas set forth here are things I agree with and think that the average man doesn’t think about. I know, for example, that my mother argues and struggles with proprietary software for her mp3 player because of DRM but I’m certain she doesn’t know what DRM is and why she has to contend with it.

Even if you aren’t a geek, this list has a plethora of things that you need to know. Not that you should know, want to know or are in anyway remotely optional. Anyone who wants to have a right to not have a video camera in their bedroom twenty years down the road needs to know these things. Read on dear viewers.

Why I didn’t jump on the iPod bandwagon.

Recently in an online chat channel, I made a confession that I own a creative zen micro. The reaction I got to this surprised me. “I can’t believe it. Isn’t each state only allowed to have one zen owner?”

The next morning the news articles started coming out with rumors of Microsoft’s “Zune” player and those articles put Apple’s share of the mp3 player market at 80% of all mp3 players owned. It made me think hard about why people wanted an iPod, and why I didn’t choose to get one.

The biggest reason is probably that I already owned a Sony PSP. The PSP is a supreme device for watching portable video on, with great sound and even better video. The video iPod did not tempt me with its small screen and sound quality that true audiophiles rate as being not bad, but not all that, even with high quality headphones. So when I went looking for a device, I didn’t need an all-in-one. I had the PSP for that, the only complaint I had with the PSP is that it’s almost too bulky to be portable for someone who wants music on the go, and the remote is poorly designed for a driver to mess with while operating a vehicle.

I needed something that fit in my pocket with clean menus that you could navigate at a stoplight without having to dig six layers deep and push numerous buttons. That’s when I started looking at the other music only players on the market.

First, I took a long hard look at the iRiver H10. It’s a nice player, loaded with features and has a color display. Great sound quality, nice player. But after playing with the device at an electronics superstore I found that I hated the slide bar navigation. It was difficult to use because the device did not fit comfortably in my hand. I have small hands. I even had to buy my own separate controller for our PS2 because the standard PS2 controllers were too bulky and made my hands hurt. The other thing that turned me off of this player was the price. 300$ is a chunk of change for a portable music device that I could easily lose. I wanted to spend less than 200$. This meant that I had to look at players that sported less than 20 gig hard drives, which was fine by me. I didn’t need 20 gig of portable music on me at all times anyway. That’s when I started looking at the iPod.

The reviews of the iPod had some info in them that really turned me off. Shipping the entire unit back to Apple and paying 59$ to have the battery replaced when it started to flake out (and they do flake out after about a year) by Apple wasn’t something that made me happy. Especially since I’d been able to buy replacement lithium ion batteries for my cell phone ever since I bought my first one. This seemed like a raw deal designed only to get more money out of consumers on Apple’s part and in my opinion was a low blow. Especially since it was possible to design the device with a battery compartment that was separate from Apple’s precious DRM technology.

Since portability was important and video wasn’t something I was interested in, I looked at the iPod nano. At the time, Apple had just discontinued the mini, which might have been a great fit for me, but I wasn’t about to purchase one off eBay without a warranty. The iPod nano seemed like it would have been perfect. I carry small purses, the nano fits well with my need to carry impossibly tiny hand bags. I had nearly decided that I wanted one of these cute little devices when I started reading up on iTunes.

The iTunes software is proprietary. Good for it, I kind of figured on that. What I didn’t figure on was that I would have to suffer through software that was nearly as bad as Sony’s SonicStage for its line of digital media devices. No drag and drop file transfer, all transfer would be through iTunes only, and heaven forbid that I ever had a hard drive failure… if the hard drive on my laptop ever failed then I would lose every song I’d ever downloaded from iTunes and the minute I plugged my iPod into a computer with a newly installed iTunes, all of my music would go away. I don’t know that this is still true of iTunes, but it was at the time that I was looking at mp3 players. Every computer I have ever owned has had a major hard drive failure in the course of its life, including the one I am using now.

All of this is well and good, but there were three final strokes that explained to me that I just didn’t need an iPod. The first, was the audio-phile frequency ratings on the iPod and the zen micro. The zen micro has a wider frequency range than the iPod, which means better sound quality over all. The final stroke… is that iTunes does not sell Japanese Pop Music. I’ve looked through their catalog, I haven’t found Gackt or Hyde or Boom Boom Sattelites or any of the music that I listen to on a regular basis. So either way, I’m stuck importing CDs from Japan.

The last stroke was the price. My zen micro was 169$ for a 6 gig player. The 2 gig iPod nano is currently 179$.

Do the math.