What is Digg?
56 Comments
- cmister, on 10/12/2007, -0/+43Wonderful idea guys. I like the fact you have targeted Amazon Unbox film downloads as well. That user agreement they have really sucks big time.
- torifile, on 10/12/2007, -8/+39I like the idea, but I disagree with the implementation. Just because a device like the Zune or iPod *can* play DRM doesn't mean that's all they can play. It's misleading to call them defective because they have the ability to play DRMed files. If that's all they could play, it's a different story. But a good idea nonetheless.
- deiru, on 10/12/2007, -2/+29Don't forget, the Zune actually adds DRM to files when you share them with other users. Obviously, this is great for Hollywood, but there's plenty of cases where this indiscriminate treatment of media should be considered harmful, possibly even illegal. For example, the Zune is essentially breaking the license agreement placed on Creative Commons licensed music. Some music protected under Creative Commons encourages sharing; the Zune breaks this agreement by causing them to disapear from the shared user's device after three days (or three plays). That's not a very desireable trait, from my point of view.
It's true that they aren't technically "defective", but they are being crippled by the design process; i.e., a design process that specifically limits your right to fair use. - ISurfTooMuch, on 10/12/2007, -0/+17People often don't care because they don't know. Education has to start somewhere.
- f0dder, on 10/12/2007, -3/+16How many will tag iPods or iTMS?
- mikeazorin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11But most people are not "In the know."
- trogdoor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11"If you stop and think about it DRM is in just about everything we do now."
All the more reason for a campaign like this. - raindog469, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12I kinda wish they kept it to stuff like CD's and DVD's where some are actually defective by design and others are unencrypted/not protected. I mean, EVERY device that plays DVD's or encrypted WMA files or has an HDMI jack (I even see some HDMI cables in there) is going to end up getting tagged, never mind the Zune and all the iPod variants. It might raise awareness but I'd like to actually use it as a shopping guide to tell me which CD's to avoid and which DVD's have Macrovision on them and therefore won't play on our MCE laptop's TV output.
At that rate, what someone else suggested with an "EffectiveByDesign" tag almost makes more sense. - Refrag, on 10/12/2007, -3/+11This is a cool idea, but I don't consider the Ipod defective by design. You don't have to use media with Digital Restrictions Management plugged into it. It works fine with audio that I have ripped from my own CDs or downloaded from any number of band websites.
The Itunes Store, sure. The Ipod, no.
I am very, very glad to see them tagging Audio CDs, though. - sotopheavy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7People should tag iTunes (and other music store) gift cards defective by design if possible. This is a great idea!
- skellener, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Almost every DVD will probably get tagged as well.
- xopherg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7There are dozens of programs that let you add and remove music from an iPod.
- AndrewJC, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9@jamcitizen:
'On every iPod you buy, it says "Don't steal music"'
~~~
DRM is not the same as not stealing music. It's possible to not steal music AND still not use DRM. - mindsocket, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8Because they _can_ play DRM, then they implicitly _support_ it. It becomes a slippery slope.
- mindsocket, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6It might be nice for you now, but why should or would the trend stop here?
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -5/+11Uh...
On every iPod you buy, it says "Don't steal music"
According to the RIAA, ripping a CD is not fair use.
Also, iPods promote the use of iTunes, and the iTMS, thus enabling DRM.
iPods DO promote DRM. - gadlaw, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Excellent. Knowledge is power. Informed consumers can vote with their purchasing dollars.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6@ m0laria,
iPod can play non-DRMed files? All of my files on the ipod are non-drm. Of the 5 or so songs I actually bought at iTunes, I converted all of them to DRM Free using hymn.
umm, yes. - raindog469, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Crap, I accidentally dugg you up because I thought you were talking about DRM.
- ISurfTooMuch, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7I have to agree...to a point. I think that devices like the iPod should get a pass from being labeled this way because you can still play unrestricted files on them, but, at the same time, they're promoting the sale of DRM'ed files. I would have the same problem with the Divx player. Not the codec many know and love but the original, completely stupid player sold by Circuit City.
However, where I think they need to be focusing is the media, such as movies and music. This is where the entertainment industry wants to make their money. Cut those sales off, and the whole house of cards collapses.
Now, there is one kind of hardware that I think must be tagged, and that is hardware that restricts fair use on its own, such as players that down-rez audio and video that doesn't come out of an encrypted output. For those, tag them until their sales fall through the floor. - Jeggoron, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Perhaps there should be two labels, one for devices that only use DRMed formats and the other for devices that have open formats in addition to the DRMed.
- Technopundit, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Anybody who buys DRM'd content online gets what they deserve. Unmanageable files that will disappear with some future drive media failure.
Good luck, iSuckers. - ISurfTooMuch, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5@m0laria
If you want to play a videotape in a VCR, you must record it using the video standard that machine can play, and these are not open standards. If you don't believe me, try building a VHS, Betamax, Hi8, MiniDV, or DVC Pro recorder without licensing the technology and see how far you get.
At least with the iPod, you can choose several encoding schemes to use. You can play AAC, MP3, and probably also WAV. OGG isn't supported, but I haven't seen many players that offer it, so you can't single out the iPod. - Web_Weasel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I also noticed that people are adding "spyware" and "rootkit" tags to software. Good job.
I bet it gets dumped when Amazon gets sued by some supplier (Sony?) for saying bad things about their products. Yes, I know that it's the users adding these tags but paranoid DRM company lawyers don't see it that way. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4"Zune actually adds DRM to files when you share them with other users... Some music protected under Creative Commons encourages sharing; the Zune breaks this agreement by causing them to disapear from the shared user's device after three days (or three plays). That's not a very desireable trait, from my point of view."
Sounds like a good weekend hacking project. DVD Jon, you out there? Then again, he looks to be going straight-edge with DoubleTwist. :/ - Refrag, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3That list would include a lot of matchbox cars and boxes of chocolate wouldn't it?
- sophiaperennis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@raindog469
Someone could easily create a new tag defectivebydesign_cds and use that only to tag CDs. - deiru, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Even if the manufacturers had no reason to include DRM? Except to get a deal from the content providers, there's no reason to put DRM on anything. CDs have been sold for some 20 years without any legal requirement to flag the content in ways that disable a player from playing them.
- m0laria, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4@truegodofwar
I'm sorry, i guess I consider having to run my music through proprietary software like iTunes, then convert them to a proprietary file format, just as bad as encrypting the files. Well, maybe only like 50% as bad, since it's only half the hassle. Just my opinion though, but enough to stop me from buying an iPod. - torifile, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3But that has nothing to do with DRM. Proprietary software is a completely different bag of chips. Don't conflate a reasonable crusade with a completely pointless one.
- JohnChapin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Is there anywhere where we can get a list of products at Amazon that do not contain DRM? Seems like that would be a much more helpful resource than listing all of the products that do.
- Refrag, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Good point about Itunes gift cards. But, they shouldn't tag Ipods as defective by design since you can use one very happily without any restricted (DRM) media on it.
- raindog469, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2And Pikmin is soooooooo NOT Lemmings.
- xopherg, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2They aren't "getting around" any kind of protection, but I will admit that the itunes database format is not an open format.
I don't think its a particularly difficult one to reverse engineer, though, as evidenced by the many programs that can read/write it. - Nighthawke, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Boy that idea took off, over 405 DBD's at this timestamp.
- jmonkey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Support bleep.com. Higest quality music downloads, no DRM. I don't work for them, just a fan.
- greekgoat91, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Remember guys you can have unprotected content on those mp3 players. Second of all, don't hate the manufactures, hate the content providers for imposing those restrictions.
- bubba9999, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1On the flip side, it would be helpful to see media that is non-DRM crippled tagged as such.
- devoinregress, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Apple is a hardware company. They make things easy for the average user who doesn't care about DRM and they make it pretty easy to recover lost data. I have never touched the iTMS but the iPod is the product and everything else is to drive the sale of that product.
- dcmjzero, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2i will probably get dug down for this (and by saying that, i guarantee it), but...
is it just me or is everyone that connected the ipod and drm getting dug down? face the facts people: the ipod is designed to play drm'ed files. digital rights management means defective by design. some have mentioned burning the songs to cds, but what about songs too long for a cd (> 74 minutes)? what about the videos from itunes?
either there are industry shills in this thread or alot of mac fanboys. - devoinregress, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I use iTunes all the time and never touch the music store (well I go to the podcasts).
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2@dpaint4
It's true that the song file names are obfuscated. But in windows explorer, you can easily create a tab for title and artist and find your music with relative ease. Also, you can just use one of the many free applications designed for transferring music around.
Besides, the iPod was never advertised as an external hard drive for transferring files. It is advertised as a music player and that is exactly what it does. - devoinregress, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Oh come on. The iPod doesn't limit you to DRM. What I want to see is what CD's I can rip and the severity of the DRM on the CD or DVD.
I have never touched DRM music and I hopefully never will have to. In one of my classes we were talking about the zune P2P capabilities and the restrictions witch only apply to DRM music. Maybe the zune will help encourage DRM free music so people can swap easier.
Being limited by DRM is one thing. Having the capability to play DRM is another. Just because the iPod can play DRM music doesn't mean you have to use DRM on it. - nimd4, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Tnx !! :)
- dpaint4, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2The files stored on an iPod are all renamed to obtuse alphanumeric strings, and referenced by the closed iTunes database, as you mention. Though the focus of that effort may not entirely be 'protection' it is clear that Apple does not want the user to be able to easily add or remove audio or video data from the device -- if they wanted that, they could simply mirror the iTunes music folder on the device itself, instead of obscuring and renaming the contents.
By contrast, there are digital audio players which the user may choose to use with a song management software suite, or may simply choose to drag and drop audio files onto via their computer's standard interface. This type of flexibility would be best such that users are not locked into a particular program or operating system to manage their audio data. - jeremyclarke, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Ipods inherently try to control what you do with your music with software locks. Apple only wants you to use the ipod with iTunes. They coudl easily give you file-level access to the hard drive on it and let you put the music on directly as well as through iTunes (how other devices work eg. creative nano), but instead they force you to use iTunes so that they can stop you from making wholesale copies of your library onto non-friendly computers. There are workaround applications out there, no doubt, but these are hacks rather than solutions, and there's no reason whatsoever for apple to not just include the functionality themselves except to restrict our ability to control our digital media. They spent more effort on stopping us from using iPods how we want than on giving us features we could use, thus it is Defective By Design, effort went to control instead of utility.
As a practical example, I loved everything about my iPod shuffle, cheap, light and easy to load (with the "fill randomly" button). BUT if I was at a friends house I had no way to even play the music that was on the device. If you plugged it into any computer other than the one that you last used to load music on your only options are "erase all data and initialize for this computer" and "cancel". That is total crap, and I had to plug his speakers right into the stupid ipod. Another hack that had no reason to be needed. When I lost the shuffle I bought a Creative Nano. Cheaper, has FM radio and NO PROGRAMMING HOURS LOGGED UNDER "CONTENT CONTROL". Designed to be useful to me rather than to the content cartel. - dpaint4, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2"There are dozens of programs that let you add and remove music from an iPod."
That's true, but they all are working to "get around" the protections put in place by Apple to prevent people from using anything but iTunes. And every time a new iPod comes out or a new iTunes comes out, all those "dozens of" products you mention tend to break and need updating to find new ways to get music on to the device.
This is not an ideal situation for consumers. - ibeetle, on 10/12/2007, -5/+3This is ridiculous. If one labels a HD DVD or Blu-ray player then every DVD player ever made would also have to be labeled.
What about televisions? They play DRM'd content. Satellite Radios. The satellite radio signal is encrypted that is a DRM format. Then of course Satellite television receivers. Cell Phones too. Game systems as well. Good-bye next generation video game fun.
If you stop and think about it DRM is in just about everything we do now. - itisme, on 10/12/2007, -3/+0I'd suggest it might be even better to run an effective by design tag.
samsung do a range of ogg supporting players that are excellent!
as for the games console analogy, I'm not sure the separate systems approach of the big companies has really driven innovation, the early days of home PCs in the UK at least were the most furtle for innovation IMHO and to a large degree I see the big companies raiding those title for anything with more soul than FIFA2000091 pikmin = lemmings, not to mention the whole upgrade cycle that obsoletes better older games which has put me off the whole area of entertainment! - SpeckledLemon, on 10/12/2007, -12/+9True, but pretty much all other DAPs can play other files too...if you're not labeling the iPod and the Zune, then why bother labeling any? It's all about the service provider's locked down DRM, not your files that you copied from a CD.
-
Show 51 - 56 of 56 discussions
Digg is coming to a city (and computer) near you! Check out all the details on our 
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is