The mobile phone market in Japan is different from that of the rest of the world as Japanese mobile phone companies control the software on the mobile phones meaning it would be very unlikely that these measures, if agreed on, would be introduced in other markets as well.

The article fails to address several difficulties of such a system. The most important ones are the following:

• What happens to songs that have been ripped from legally bought CDs? Won’t they be played at all? (this assumes that it is legal in Japan to rip CDs)
• What happens if no connection is available currently? (Will it be possible to play songs without net connection?)
• Who pays for the traffic that the song checks create?

Please post your opinions in the comments.

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The customers who have bought the books did receive a refund but were left puzzled and confused. Anyone who thought that ebooks with DRM were just like book purchases might now realize that they are not at all as Amazon and the publishers seem to have the power to remove books at any time from the user’s possession. Amazon responded to user questions with the following paragraph:

The Kindle edition books Animal Farm by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) & Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) were removed from the Kindle store and are no longer available for purchase. When this occured, your purchases were automatically refunded. You can still locate the books in the Kindle store, but each has a status of not yet available. Although a rarity, publishers can decide to pull their content from the Kindle store.

Amazon states that is is unlikely to happen again. What users do need to realize is that it can happen at anytime. That’s a huge difference to books or other media that are purchased in stores. Once you bought it it is yours and no publisher or company in the world will come to your house to get the book back and give you a refund. Customers thinking about purchasing a kindle or any other electronic device that is making use of DRM should start thinking about viable alternatives that come without DRM. It’s better for them, their children and our future.

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Probably as disturbing is the fact that it is possible to overcome the problem by changing the date of the system to one prior to January 28. If this was supposed to be some kind of protection it was more than useless considering that the system data is checked for the data and not some server on the Internet.

It does look more like a blunder of someone forgetting to renew the certificate for the game. That again leaves the question unanswered why the game needs a certificate in first place.

No word yet on the piracy front but bets are 10:1 that the pirated copies of Gears of War are working just fine. If you bought the game you can either change your system date or wait for an official patch which is said to be out soon. Epic Fail so to speak..

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It was actually very easy to predict. One simply had to look at all the other companies who decided to turn off their DRM servers leaving their customers standing in the rain. All of them caved in after announcing that they would turn off their DRM servers.

Why don’t the decision makers look around first to get a feeling for what will happen if they announce the shutdown of DRM servers? It happened numerous times already in the last years and it always went off the same way. Company A announces the shutdown of their DRM servers. They usually do that by mailing their customers or posting an announcement in the online store.

The online community notices what company A is trying to do and is writing about it in protest. No one likes the decision of company A at that time. Bad press and customer complaints result in company A changing their mind and either providing their customers with a better deal or canceling the decision to turn off the servers.

Why can’t there be an instructions manual for overpaid managers who think that laying all the burden of turning off a service on the customer is a good idea that would save the company money?

Here is the original email send out by Walmart (via Engadget):

NOTE: This is a follow-up to our email titled “Important Information About Your Digital Music Purchases” from 9/26/08.

Based on feedback from our customers, we have decided to maintain our digital rights management (DRM) servers for the present time. What this means to you is that our existing service continues and there is no action required on your part. Our customer service team will continue to assist with DRM issues for protected windows media audio (WMA) files purchased from Walmart.com.

While our customer support team is available to assist you with any issues, we continue to recommend that you back up your songs by burning them to a recordable audio CD. By backing up your songs, you insure access to them from any personal computer at any time in the future.

We appreciate your support and patience as we work to provide the best service possible to you. As we move forward with our 100% MP3 store, we’ll continue to update you with key decisions regarding our service and your account via email.

Thank you for using Walmart MP3 Music Downloads.

The Walmart Digital Music Team

Who wants to bet on the next company that is making the same mistake?

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Till now, YouTube was a place only for watching videos. Still, with other sites getting their act together, it was only a matter of time before these guys pulled up their socks and took a look at the services they offer.

What am I referring to? Well, the next time you’re watching a video and decide you like the song that’s playing in the background, you may just be able to purchase the song for your own music collection. YouTube has begun providing Amazon and iTunes links for videos.

These ‘click-to-buy’ links are YouTube’s way of making it easy for users to purchase something they like. And it’s not limited only to music. In the case of video game related videos like trailers, a link to buy the game will be available.

As of now, download links are available only for partner videos i.e. content uploaded directly by companies (EMI, for example). Also, this feature is currently available only in the United States but that should change soon.

This is a pleasant surprise from YouTube. One instant bonus I can think of is that it makes it easy to identify the artist and song name for an unidentified video. What do you think about YouTube’s click-to-buy service? Any other advantages or disadvantages you can come up with? Let me know in the comments.

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Walmart started selling music back in August 2007. The music was protected by DRM for the first six month after which Walmart decided that the hassle was not worth it. DRM was removed from all songs and users were able to purchase DRM free songs from then on.

The announcement that Walmart would shut down its DRM servers was send by email to all customers who purchased songs protected by DRM from one of the biggest companies in the world. The consequence for the user is dire. It is possible to play the songs on the authorized computer but it will not be possible to burn them or listen to them on a new computer after October 9, the day the servers are shut down.

Walmart is suggesting to burn the music to CD to be able to move them to a new computer. The first thing that is odd about this recommendation is a general observation. DRM was allegedly implemented to prevent the unauthorized copying of protected media. If users are able to burn the media to CD and rip those CDs back to a computer then the system failed miserably. What’s the purpose of protecting files with DRM if anyone can bypass it that easily?

The second odd thing about this is that a company like Walmart is seemingly not capable of providing a better solution to their customers. They simply pull the plug and the customers have to see how they can access their purchased music in the future.

Lastly what happens to customers who would like to re-download a song that they have purchased at the music store? Will they be able to download it again DRM free or will Walmart simply state that the song is no longer available? A commenter at the Boing Boing site mentioned that he tried to download songs that he purchased again from Walmart but was not able to do so because they were no longer available.

The only positive aspect is that another company is getting rid of DRM. The feeling remains though that it has more to do with the complexity of DRM and the additional costs of the servers and support than fulfilling customer demand.

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This first plans were watered down after the Internet community noticed the plans and the regular checks on the Internet were canceled. Gamers were still not pleased with several other aspects of the protection such as forcing them to have the game DVD in drive and only allowing them to reinstall the game three times before they had to contact EA to be able to install the game again.

The release of Spore saw some heavy protests which concentrated on pushing bad ratings of Spore on the Amazon.com website. The game has currently been reviewed by nearly 2400 customers of whom 2133 have rated it with the worst possible rating.

This protest seemed to have an effect on Electronic Art’s decision – according to online gaming portal IGN – to ease up on the DRM of the upcoming Red Alert 3 game.

The maximum amount of installations before having to contact EA was raised to five and the DVD is no longer required to be in the drive to play the game. While that does not meet the demands of gamers worldwide who want the games that they purchase to be on pair with the games that can be downloaded from P2P sources.

Buying the game would mean to pay money for it, to be restricted in the number of installations and face the hassle of contacting EA whenever the maximum number is reached, to have a resident program on the computer that wont play the game if certain software is installed on the PC, that might stop working in the future because of closed activation servers. It does on the other hand come with a manual (most game manuals cannot be really called that these days), a box and the knowledge that the developers and publishers have been paid for their work.

The guys who download the game from the Internet do not pay a dime for it, get the manual as a PDF as well, get a game that they do not have to activate online, a game that they can install as often as they want and a game that does not install the resident software. It is however illegal to do that.

The problem that arises for gamers who know about DRM is that they feel cheated. They pay money for the game but get the “bad” version while the downloaders can enjoy a hassle free game.

The whole story feels more like a “Oh god they are protesting so much, let us throw a bone at them and maybe they stop protesting”. Is that bone enough? Definitely not. Will the DRM stop the game from being pirated? Definitely not.

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Well Spore was destined to be different. If you look at the Amazon ratings of the game you currently see 723 reviews. 22 five star reviews, 13 four star reviews, 5 three star reviews, 18 two star reviews and 673 one star reviews. One star reviews are the lowest ratings possible for products at Amazon.

One could think that reviewers did not like the game and decided to give it a low rating at Amazon. This is apparently not the case. The majority of the reviewers are giving it a one star rating because of its DRM protection.

Spore has to be activated over the Internet so that the user can play the game. Electronic Arts first wanted to implement a DRM system that required regular authentications but removed that after huge protests broke out.

So every user has to activate the game over the Internet which is strange for a single player game. The number of activations are limited to three and users have to call (!) support for additional activations. Uninstallation won’t give an activation back. If the user installs the operating system anew and the game afterwards that’s another activation, even if it’s the same computer.

We have also seen what happens if a company that sold DRM media turns off the servers that are responsible for the authentication. It happened to giants like Google Microsoft and Yahoo before so who can say that the EA game will authenticate in ten years?

I think it is interesting to see that a dedicated base of users can control the rating system of such a big company like Amazon. Amazon will probably remove most of the ratings as they have done in the past but it should keep a few users from buying the game.

Is it a good game? I honestly do not know and since I’m still on an EA games boycott I could care less.

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Microsoft backpedaled quickly after it became apparent that the public was not that pleased with their decision and decided to keep the servers up and running for another three year period. The huge problem that arises when DRM servers are taken off the Internet is that the verification process will fail which means that users who want to move the music from an old to a new computer – where they had to verify the music again – would realize that they could not do so because of the server being offline.

Yahoo apparently did not pay attention to the media fiasco and decided to close the Yahoo! Music Store and take the DRM servers offline on September 30, 2008.

Yahoo is giving users of their music service the advise to burn the tracks to CD and rip those tracks on the new computer so that they would be able to listen to the music on a new computer as well.

If you needed another reason why DRM is bad then you got it. And it’s not that some small companies decided to turn off their servers, it’s two huge global corporations that decided to do it. (And Google did it as well before with Google Video)

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A current trend seems to be to include identifying tags into the downloaded music. While that is not a huge problem if you keep a close eye on your music collection you could run into troubles if someone would steal your computer, notebook or mp3 player. Besides that every single song is available on those networks anyway.

It’s a gray area legally in my opinion and I would suggest to everyone to remove the identifying information from those songs.

Rhapsody is storing the Download ID which identifies the user who purchased and downloaded the song in several tags, those tags are: COMM, TXXX, TXXX01, TXXX02, APIC, GEOB.

Every mp3 tag editor can clear the information in these tags but it is also possible to use a small perl script to get rid of the tags. The Reddit user Keck (via Arsgeek) published it on Reddit and everyone can copy and paste the script from his Reddit user page.

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Everyone who’s ever experienced music with DRM knows just how frustrating things can get. You buy a great new song and then realize you are bound by really dumb restrictions. That too on something you paid good money for. Still, the DRM wall is collapsing slowly but surely thanks to music stores willing to offer DRM-free music.

Back to Napster. The store has two main listening options. You can either opt for a monthly listening subscription which works out cheaper or download individual songs for 99 cents. Oh yeah, you can also download a full album for $9.95. Apart from being DRM-free, the songs are encoded at a reasonably high quality bitrate of 256 kbps and come with album art.

Why is Napster doing this? SImple. They’re looking to compete with iTunes. Apple has pretty much been the music retailer to beat for anyone looking to dominate the online music market. They seem to have started on a good note. Napster claims to have 6 million songs in their store songs from both major record labels and indie artists.

I’m going to wait and watch how Napster does before I pass any final judgments on their service. What do you think of Napster’s strategy? Would you be willing to purchase songs from their store? How do you think they’ll do against iTunes and the rest? Let me know in the comments.

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There’s nothing wrong in wanting to beat iTunes. However, the way Nokia is going about things, you’d think they were trying to scare away all their customers. It’s a case of how do I frighten thee? Let me count the ways.

Let’s start by getting to the site. I accessed the site using Firefox and was told that the music store does not support the browser. You can only get to the site using IE6 or higher. That’s strike one. To transfer the music to your phone, you need to have Windows XP or Vista. That’s strike two since it shuts out all the Linux and Mac users.

Assuming you fulfill the first two criteria, the fun doesn’t stop there. Music on the site is only available in the proprietary ‘wma’ format, so your phone needs to have Windows Media Player to play your tunes. At $1.70 a song, it might interest you to know that the songs are DRM enabled as well. So, you cannot play the song anywhere else except for your phone.

In my first para, I mentioned Nokia was looking to topple iTunes. Their most brilliant strategy to do that? The songs cannot be played on iPod. That’s right, the most popular portable media player will not play any of these songs. Brilliant marketing strategy isn’t it?

To quote Andre Yoskowitz at Afterdawn, “I’m not sure who at Nokia thought that offering expensive, DRM-crippled music that cannot be played on iPods was a good idea but they should not have a job.”

How many of you would be willing to purchase music like this? What do you think of Nokia’s marketing strategy? What’s your opinion on these kind of arm-twisting tactics? Let me know.

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What made me turn away back then is slowly becoming a problem for those users who did not turn away, who did purchase music and videos on those Internet stores. DRM is dependent on that store and license servers. If those stores and servers are gone, be it because the company ceases to exist or because it makes the decision to close the online store, then guess what ? The user is left with DRM files that cannot be transferred to a new computer or retrieved anymore. Without a licensing server there is no way to activate the music and videos legally.

How does that sound ? Some users defended DRM by stating that smaller companies would probably run into those problems but if a user would buy from big companies, like Microsoft, Apple or Yahoo they would not run into them. (Was not Google involved in something similar last year?) This can be easily refuted right now by pointing to the announcement that Microsoft made:

As of August 31, 2008, we will no longer be able to support the retrieval of license keys for the songs you purchased from MSN Music or the authorization of additional computers.

So, if you did purchase music from MSN Music you better start burning the music to CDs and DVDs and rip them again to get rid of the DRM so that you can keep the music that you did purchase for a lifetime.

I do not feel sorry for the users who made the purchases. If no one would buy music with DRM the companies would sooner than later start online shops without DRM. Not that it protects anything either.

via [Download Squad]

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If it’s not about preventing the music from being spread, what is it about then ? That’s the question. My thoughts are that someone sold DRM to the CEOs and Executives and that they, with their limited technical understanding thought that it would prevent music piracy. In the end, only the consumers who purchase music are screwed, as you can see in this fine example.

Sony decided to close down their Connect music store that tried to push once again a proprietary format. They miserably failed and that is probably the main reason for the closure. The problem for consumers however is that the music that they purchased from that store had DRM in it.

Don’t worry, the music will play just fine after the store closes down, that is, unless you happen to change your computer hardware. Because at this point, it will stop playing. Ain’t that great ? You bought music thinking that you could enjoy it for the rest of your life only to find out that it won’t play if you change computer hardware or use a new computer.

I’m not sure how you see this but I think that this is absolutely unacceptable. If they want to use DRM they have to make sure that music will play even if they decided to close down their store or change their policy or whatever. My advice: Don’t buy music with DRM ever.

Closing lines are from the Download Squad article, very fitting I think:

DRM does not prevent piracy. DRM merely shafts loyal, paying customers who choose to legitimately obtain their media online

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Each tv company that sets up a video portal with the option to download videos is building their own video player. We got NBC Direct and HBO on Broadband for instance, Netflix and Apple of course. That’s four different video players each with its own restrictions. If you want to use all four services you have to install four different clients that basically do the same, they restrict usage.

The messy part begins when you take a look at expiration dates and the like. Do you know when videos that you have downloaded expire in all of these services ? Is there a way to keep track of the dates without having to open all the applications to take a look at all downloaded videos ?

What I mean is that it does not make much sense from a consumer point of view to create one video client per service. The companies on the other hand want full control of the player and their content which is probably the main reason why they do not create cooperations with other companies that basically do the same thing.

I can’t give an answer to the question above, a universal answer I mean. I still say we only need one player but we probably will end up with one player for each company that is entering the market which could be quite a few.

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Guess how many times I had to see this announcement ? Seven Times ! Yes that’s right. They put it on all DVDs. I was not able to skip it and that is why I’m writing this article about it. Let me ask you another question. Tell me how many times users who download 24 season 4 from the Internet are seeing this message ? Zero Times ! Yes that is right. If you pirate the tv series you get a clean copy without that nice Piracy reminder that people who BUY the DVD get.

Am I the only one who thinks something is seriously out of line here ? It’s like those game copy protections that do more harm than good. Buyers have to live with the copy protection even though it could mean that the game won’t play on their computer but guys who download it ? They get a crack and can run it without DVD at all.

Let’s talk about DRM in music. Do you think that the majority of songs in Peer to Peer networks has DRM ? The stance of the Music Industry is thankfully changing on this matter and I really hope that the Movie and Gaming Industry will make the changes as well.

If I purchase a DVD I do not want to see ads against Piracy. This is insane. The same is happening in cinemas all over the country. You see anti-piracy ads in cinema. Are they going to try to convince the one guy that might sit in one of the cinemas with his cam to stop making a recording the movie ?

One could say that they try to sensitize the public but do they have to do that in front of people who actually purchased a product ? Why don’t they do tv commercials instead ? That would probably be more effective and buyers would not feel so irritated with all the anti-piracy ads in their purchased products.

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Unbox ? Yes, that’s the video download service that imposes more restrictions on the user but apparently more flexible when it comes to bulk pricing and discounts. Users can only use Unbox is they have a computer with a Microsoft Windows operating system. Linux and Mac can’t use it which does not seem to bother NBC or Amazon at all.

One of the likely package deals offered is a 30% discount if you buy the complete season of a tv show. This discount is of course given on the sum that all single episodes would cost and NBC made it very clear that they could go as high as $4.99 for one single episode download.

So, to keep it short. NBC ditches Apple iTunes to work with Amazon Unbox instead which offers them more flexibility in pricing. You did not read about the people anywhere in this article ? That’s easy to explain, the people – aka the consumers – don’t matter at all.

I suppose NBC thinks that they will switch to Unbox because they want the shows so badly. I would suggest you show them otherwise.

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Great news for customers who wasted precious time selecting and buying videos only to find out that their purchased videos will stop working soon. It is even more important that it was not a small company who had to shutdown their service but a billion dollar company.

This in turn means that it could happen to anyone who purchases products – media normally such as music or videos – that have some sort of DRM integrated in the data.

We already see a shift away from DRM towards watermarked media files which is definitely a step in the right direction. Better of course does not mean perfect but it is heading towards a good direction.

The other occurence that involved some sort of DRM was when Microsofts WGA servers went down flagging all genuine Windows Vista installations as invalid if a WGA check was performed on those systems.

So, updating your system had the result that your formerly validated Windows Vista was flagged as not validated which meant that the updates could not be installed.

Microsoft was able to fix the issue after two days and users are again able to validate their system to be able to download updates for it. Some users claim that Windows Update is not working anymore after re-validating their system which can only be attributed to this process.

The bottom line is this: It is not safe to say that you will be allowed to keep data that you purchased. It can happen that you will lose that data without being able to interfere at all. Would you buy a car, a CD or DVD if someone told you that it could happen that you would not be able to play them in the future if the producer decided to stop distributing them ?

I know that it is quite comfortable to download music and videos from the Internet but I personally think that it is not worth it at all. You will lose what you bought in the long run, that is my prediction.

Even if you purchase a product that uses DRM, WGA (replace with other acronyms that will surely replace these in the future)

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This is however not the case. All videos will no longer play after the termination of the service which can be used as a major argument against DRM services. Google – wisely – decided to compensate users by refunding each and everyone

The money will be refunded into a Google Checkout account and expires after 60 days. What this means is that the users who bought videos from Google Video have 60 days to purchase items that they probably do not need from merchants who use Google Checkout. Hardly a fair deal for the consumer if you ask me.

The steps that Google is undertaking to close down their Video service is clearly showing why DRM is not consumer friendly. If the company that sold you items with DRM goes broke, out of business or decides to terminate the service you will realize that your purchased items do not play anymore – and yes, this is also the case with Apple and the songs that they sell that contain DRM.

If you are lucky you get a full refund, if not you might get something that looks like a refund but is basically pushing a different service which is in this case Google Checkout. And if you are out of luck you might not get compensated at all. Does not feel nice to pay a lot of money for items only to find out that you can’t play them anymore on your system, doesn’t it ?

No one would purchase an item in real life that could stop working if the company selling you the item got broke or quit producing the item but this is exactly what is happening right now.

Google sold you videos, made a strategic decision to terminate their service and decided to push the Google Checkout service by tying the refunds to it.

I think it is helpful that consumers now see and hopefully realize that drm media purchased from “big” companies are not guaranteed to work a lifetime which should hopefully push the masses away from DRM.

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You can find some really clever designs among the 46 and I would like to display the five designs that I liked the most here at Ghacks. Just head over to the Torrentfreak website to take a look at all of the designs. The winning design will receive a price of $250, the second one of $100 and the third a price of $50.

All three winning designs will go into print and be available for $15 afterwards. Money made from the T-Shirts will go to charity.

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