Yo!

1

March 27, 2011

There’s a truism in the world of copyright and media piracy: you can’t compete with free. Thing is, though, you can.

Continued…

Categories: complaint, confession, DRM, idea, Personal.

Reading Along

1

January 16, 2011

Since updating to OS X 10.6.6 and having available the new Mac App Store, I have acquired yet another book app: Amazon’s Kindle for Mac. There have been, and are, others, none of which have the killer function that I look for in an eReader. Continued…

Technorati Tags: ,

Categories: complaint, confession, DRM, idea, Personal, Recommendation.

Tags: ,

“Press ‘Play’ on that one, and ‘Record’ on that one.”

2

January 29, 2010

I heard someone say it today at STV.  It about sums up the best of my childhood, that.  From copying a rental edition of Empire Strikes Back (later paying for it twice on VHS and again on DVD, not to mention the cinema tickets for the re-release) to making mix tapes to impress a girl, “Press ‘play’ on that one, and ‘Record’ on that one,” made magic happen.

I had finished for the day.  I’d saved my project, closed the application, shut down the computer and gathered my things.  On the way to the door I heard a woman say it.  Looking instinctively in her direction, I saw her regarding a video tape deck, probably DigiBeta, and a DVD recorder.  Although both formats were digital, they were linked by a fat, umbilically analogue cable.

I assumed they were transferring the tape’s contents onto DVD, but it could easily have been the opposite. It didn’t matter.  It mattered only that one was to play, and the other was to record.

I was instantly reminded how lucky I am to have a job that lets me do for a living what, in childhood, I did for fun.  Or, if not for fun, because it seemed the right thing to do while I was in that blissful state of having two hard-working individuals subsidise my entire existence.  The options weren’t infinite during that time, but they were multitudinous, and I often chose among that wealth of possibilities to press ‘Play’ on one machine and ‘Record’ on another.

Sometimes I was taking possession of something I had only paid to rent, sometimes I was sharing culture.  I was stealing.  I was giving.  Plus I edited my first film by hooking two VHS recorders up and learning how many seconds it took one of them to actually start recording after you hit the button (slightly nearer four than three seconds, FYI).

What I do for a living now amounts to making copies.  The camera copies what it sees onto film, or tape, or solid state media.  I copy that information onto a hard drive, reorganise it and make multiple copies of my derivative work.  In TV, I deliver some of those copies to various places and other people make many more copies, broadcasting them, analogue and  digital, over the airwaves and hosting them on streaming web platforms. Then any interested home users (if we’re fortunate enough to have any) copy them to their local systems and put yet more copies on YouTube and similar sites.)  Frankly, the more the merrier.

There’s a hysterical crisis over copying at the moment, but I won’t get into it here, except to say that, broadly, I’m all for copying and always have been.  I’m for preservation, for sharing and, yes, for paying what I deem fit (which ranges from nothing to far in excess of what is being asked).

For me, it started with, “Press ‘Play’ on that one, and ‘Record’ on that one,” and I’m so glad that within the broadcast industry it’s still, on occasion, considered a solution rather than a problem.

Technorati Tags:

Categories: complaint, confession, DRM, editing, Personal, politics, Recommendation, tv, Work.

Tags:

The UK has the final stretch of Battlestar Galactica

0

February 13, 2009

UPDATE:  I have discovered that this post is mostly bollocks, because Sky have been showing the new episodes in this country for weeks (in fact, just four days after the US broadcast).  Shows what I know.  I’m leaving it up, though, firstly because I feel simply deleting it will be dishonest regarding my ignorance, and because although it’s totally inaccurate in the details about the availability of the final episodes of Galactica, I stand by my general points about torrents and DRM.  So here, unedited of stupidity, is the original post:

Sky TV, who co-funded the 21st century Battlestar Galactica miniseries, will begin showing the latter half of the fourth and final season on Tuesday 8th April.  The Sci-Fi Channel in the US (as different from the UK Sci-Fi channel as BBC America is from our ‘beeb’) has been broadcasting these last episodes for a month now.

At first, I had a choice.  I could do what I’ve done in previous years: wait for Sky to show it in the UK, get fed up with an entire week between episodes, not to mention ad breaks, and give up, waiting instead for the DVD boxset, which I would consume in one marathon go.   Or…   I could torrent it episode by episode.  I’d have the week gap to contend with, but this is special.  I can’t wait, just can’t wait, to see how it all turns out.  So for the last month, that’s what I’ve done.

I justify it thus: I don’t have to justify it.  In addition, though, I can justify it if I want: I’ll still watch it on TV (for the superior quality), so they’ll get the ratings, and I’ll still buy it on DVD.  I’ll probably even buy it on Bluray when the get done licking their wounds over HD-DVD.  So they’ll lose no ad revenue or royalties from me as a result of my illegal acquisition of material that the powers that be have decided should not be seen by me until well after my next birthday.

So I torrented it.  It’s an uncertain world out there.  The first episode was encoded from a high-def original, and looked simply fabulous on my laptop screen.  Plus, not being DRM’d, it looked even more fabulous when I copied it to my Playstation 3 and watched it on my telly.  Since then, the best I could hope for in terms of picture quality wasn’t that great.  The last one I torrented was lousily encoded, and it affected my enjoyment of the league-of-its-own drama.

Then I made a discovery.  The powers that be had been releasing these new episodes in the UK, in both standard and high definition, via the iTunes store.  A week behind their US broadcast, they became available for purchase, £1.89 for standard def, £2.49 for that and high def (presumably so you can put the space-saving SD version on your iPod/ iPhone).

This was a deal breaker when it came to my brief flirtation with torrenting.  Not because it was legal, or because it gave the makers of this fine show some revenue (I had that covered, remember), but because the quality was second to none, and there were no ads.  (In case you’re from outside the US, or are from the UK and don’t watch anything on Living TV, there is now a trend for advertising upcoming shows DURING AN ACTUAL PROGRAMME.  You’re watching CSI, trying to figure out if it was the waiter or his pre-0p lover who pushed the lawyer into the live volcano, when graphics fill half the screen instructing you to set your PVR for Crossing Jordan next Wednesday.  TV Land is getting desperate, no?)

TV, DVD, film companies, LISTEN: people are willing to pay for quality and fairness.  I’ll happily give you two-fifty for a show that I know is complete and freely available elsewhere on the planet if you treat me with a little respect.

In the case of iTunes, there is still the DRM.  I can’t watch the glorious HD on anything other than my laptop screen, because Apple have encumbered the file with extra data — developed at great expense to them — which checks to see what device I’m playing it on, and whether that device has been their blessing to play said file.  Madness.  I could have watched the episode I’ve just finished a week ago, for free.  The only thing that stopped me was that the pirates weren’t discerning enough in their encoding.

That’s what you have that they don’t.  That’s why I’ll give my money to you and not get it from p2p for free, NOT because you’ve “cleverly” broken your file with DRM that’ll make you, to quote Douglas Adams, “the first agains the wall when the revolution comes.”

So I’m legal again, folks.  But not entirely happy about it.

P.S.  And another thing: why was I unaware that Galactica was on?  I understand that Sky have been running commercials that I’ve obviously missed, but I googled it and the closest I came was some fan posting on a blog saying Sky had told him the new series was starting in April.  If you go to Sky’s official page for the series, there’s no mention of broadcast times.  There are some video interviews, and on one of the taglines there is an indirect reference to the fact that season 4.5 is back, but no more detail than that.  I realise the mistake is mine, but Sky really don’t seem to be advertising it very well.  Everything in the world can’t be my fault, can it?

Categories: confession, DRM.

Where are the new liner notes?

0

October 18, 2008

Last month I took up a free trial of eMusic.  This is a service where you pay monthly for an allotted amount of music and audiobook downloads (they don’t carry over, btw).  The files are free of DRM and end up quite inexpensive.  I don’t know how good the deal is for the artists, but from a consumer point of view it’s a good half-way house between iTunes and illegal file-sharing.

This is just one of countless download stores out there, from Amazon, Napster, Walmart and all the rest.  My problem is this: why don’t they take all the useful info you get on sleeve notes and put it in the meta data?  I’m not alone, I’m sure, in scrutinising the track listings, learning who played what, who wrote what, who produced what, who’s getting thanked.  Hell, even reading the lyrics now and again.

Occasionally iTunes will offer a DRM-crippled pdf of the CD booklet if you buy an entire album (rather than single tracks), which is something, I suppose, but it’s nowhere near as good as my idea, which is simply to use the ID3 tags.

All the tracks I got from eMusic had lovely embedded artwork, and had the year, artist, album and name tags duly in place, but all the info that you normally get as a matter of course with a CD was conspicuous by its absence.  I listen through iTunes which has fields for all the info you could want, always blank.  There’s even a Notes bit for those wee mini-essays Springsteen sometimes writes, or some muso journalist wank on retrospectives, or whatever.

It’s easy, it’s cheap.  Could it be that the Jurassic music industry is so desperate to keep us buying CDs that they jealously guard the name of the session bass-player on Take That’s new record for those consumers doomed to clutter up there home with yet more shiny discs?

Surely not…

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Categories: complaint, DRM, idea, Personal.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“I’m not a shill, I’m a human being!” or History of an Unread Blog

3

September 8, 2008

A reader on Boing Boing going by the name of loraksus accused me of being an EA shill for the post on Spore’s DRM.  While I admire the diligence in rooting out potential shills, I can’t let the accusation pass.

Part of the ‘evidence’ was how recently the first post on this blog was made.  It suggested to loraksus that the whole thing is could be a hastily erected viral ad for Spore, set up to push the insidious argument that perhaps we should oppose DRM by making arguments rather than merely proclaiming turpitude (surely the slippery slope to actually supporting DRM).

For the record, although I’ve been blogging since 2006, I moved from my own crap, handmade blog to a more organised affair using Apple’s iWeb software in February 2007.  Here I took the time to transfer the old posts to iWeb. However, I found Apple’s servers painfully slow, even when using CNAME to use my own domain (a .net rather than the .co.uk I’d been using).

So, fed up with Apple, I got started in WordPress.  I left the old .net site up for the few posts that were on that (the archive having vanished — all that work, another reason to ditch Apple), and went back to the .co.uk domain with WordPress.

Thanks to being skint for a bit, and not paying my hosting fee, my host deleted the site.  I then got them some dosh, had them do what they called a ‘site restore’ and ended up with everything but the posts themselves because I stupidly failed to have a backup of the MySQL database.  Rather than re-enter everything manually (again), I decided to just start again.

And that’s the story of the blog, and why it seems new.  For anyone who wants to, I have uploaded my original, nuts’n'bolts site, simply to make that content available again.  It’s not indexed and there’s no RSS or anything, but there it is.

I recommend my post on not meeting Ray Bradbury, but then I’m biased.

But not a shill.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , ,

Categories: DRM, Personal.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Spore DRM controversy too one sided?

16

September 8, 2008

Anyone who knows me (or read the old blog before my host deleted it) knows I hate DRM.  I read with interest, then, about the backlash against the heavily-anticipated Will Wright game Spore thanks to EA’s use of DRM.  As many of my friends have been raving about Spore and using its online creature designer on the run up to the game’s full release, I thought I’d ask one of the more knowldegable of them about the fiasco.

Being a sensible web-user, unlike me, this fellow protects his online identity, so I shall call him AnonyMaster.  Here’s our conversation of this morning:

Me:

Bad rumblings on Spore’s DRM http://fredbenenson.com/blog/2008/09/07/spore-drm-and-disorganized-activism/

The Amazon situation seems to have got worse since that post, with the average rating 1.5.  I’d be interested to see if this issue bothers you at all, or if you just shrug it off.

AnonyMaster:

The fact is Spore was hacked and made available on Torrent 2 weeks before it was officially released.

I bought Spore instead of downloading it for free because I like Will Wrights games and I wanted to own a copy of it. Same reason I buy DVDs I like instead of just torrenting a pirate.

If I didnt appreciate Will Wrights games I might have torrented this one and played it for a while, then liked it (it is fucking awesome) and then went out and bought a real copy.

Simple fact is DRM doesnt work. I wonder why companies continually spend money using it.

Basically its a bunch of people whining because some skiddie says that DRM software is teh evil man whilst none of them know what it is and what it actually does. Amazon fad will die out in a matter of weeks and they’ll all be playing spore. Most of the one star reviewers are likely already playing it.

Me:

That’s makes sense, but what about the 3-install issue.  Doesn’t that mean that in real terms you don’t actually own the copy?
AnonyMaster:

The 3 install is just some nonsense people who have no understanding of how SecuROM works have been spreading around.

Spores version of SecuROM validates your system against the EA servers which host Spores content online. To do this it requires matching your system to the installation code. (The old passwords system is shit, just ask Blizzard on WoW accounts get hacked every day, thats why EA chose DRM)

You can install the game as many times as you like on any 3 PC’s you choose. If you install a new operating system however or change your hardware and if you’ve used your 3 different machine installs already, then you wont be able to access the online content, only play offline….

…. But all you have to do is email EA support with the account details and they add to your install count so you can install again on your new/modified machine.

Its not very draconian at all tbh, and much better than having your sporepedia account hacked and not being able to play the game because some guy in Russia is using your account and changed the password.

Me:

Cool.  Can I quote you (anonymously, of course) on my blog to bring these arguments to the world at large?

AnonyMaster:

Of course you can,

Remember and make clear, when you buy Spore, you are essentially buying 3 licenses to run the game on any 3 machines you choose. You can uninstall and reinstall on any 3 machines as many times as you like.

The only issue is when, you change the hardware and/or OS on one of those machines, if you are already using your other two licenses then you need to contact EA to get them them to un-enable your old license for the PC and enable a replacement license to work for your modified machine. EA will do this as on a case to case basis.

So there you go.  My interest in bringing this to you, believe it or not, is to further the case against DRM.  When I read the Amazon reviews, it struck me as a bit hysterical.  I don’t think the case against DRM will be helped much by arguments that are over-egged.  It just makes it easy for people like AnonyMaster here, and by extension companies like EA, to brush aside the issue.

If we keep our head about us we increase our chance of success, surely?

I agree that the DRM on Spore sounds like a bum deal (I’ll never know first hand because it’s really not my kind of game), and I’m glad EA are feeling some heat over it, but if we’re not careful we’re all going to be labeled anti-DRM nuts and won’t be taken seriously anymore.   Especially as I suspect that the Amazon thing will not stop Spore being a huge seller, which will in turn discredit the one-star reviewers in the eyes of the industry.

In short, when arguing against DRM, lets simply be right and not succumb to hyperbole.

Disclaimer: I can be hypocritically hyperbolic if I want when discussing Windows, because I’m not trying to win an argument — that ship’s sailed, I’m just pissed off about it.

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

Categories: DRM.

Tags: , , , , ,