The sites Torrentfreak and Beautiful Crime announced an Anti-DRM T-Shirt competition a while ago and all entries to the competition have been posted on the Torrentfreak website. All 46 T-Shirt designs can be seen and everyone may vote for their favorite T-Shirt design. Who would have thought that this competition would get such a large amount of entrants ?

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.

Categories: Cool, Entertainment

Now if that is not a clever idea. Force DRM on the users for several years with a pricing scheme straight out of hell and then use a huge publicity machine to make the customers believe that DRM free music is the future raising prices once more. If you thought that everything would be good now that many labels decided to offer drm free music albums as well you could not be more wrong. What is happening now is that the Music Industry once again fools the customers by offering overpriced products.

Categories: iPod, Music Industry, P2p

Microsoft added resource heavy DRM processes to Windows Vista in a move to “please” the content industry. I can’t think of another reason why they would add this kind of mechanisms if there would not be some kind of agreement between them and the content industry. Microsoft would have made such a big impact if Vista would not enforce digital rights management protections on content. The system would probably be more stable, faster and more resource friendly. Well, Microsoft decided to ensure that not only the needs of the consumers but also those of the content owners would be supported which makes me wonder which consumer would actually be pro DRM.

Categories: Hacking, Music Industry, Operating Systems, Windows

I found this interesting article at DRM Alternatives and would like to share it. DRM Free Music Search is a service that searches 19 music sites that offer – only – DRM free music. Some sites sell the music while others provide it for free to their visitors. The search uses Ajax to display the search results. Just enter a search term and watch how the results appear below the search box. Every result displays the title, the artist, the name of the album, the music site that hosts the file and the possible price of the file or album.

Categories: Music Industry, The Web

It is relatively easy to remove drm from wmv files, all you need is the freeware called Fair Use 4 WM which you can downloaded in the latest version from yousendit. You need to prepare your system to be able to remove drm from wmv files, just take a look at the following steps. You need to uninstall Windows Media Player 11 if it is installed on your system. To do that go to the add / remove programs and check the show updates box as well.

Categories: Hacking, Tools

I’m sick and tired. Sick and tired of the RIAA, the Recording Industry Association of America, their methods, their pressure against their customers, their inability to cope with a new situation, their stubbornness and their greed. Instead of listening to their customers and possible customers they cling to their old ways of distribution and show an unbelievable ineffectiveness to cope with new technologies and ways of spreading music.

Categories: Music Industry, The Web

If you purchase songs from iTunes you will soon notice that the downloaded m4p files are protected and you will have troubles playing them in mp3 players or software players other than itunes and an iPod. Some users think that this is not the way it should be and even some governments seem to think that the connection between songs purchased in iTunes and the restrictions imposed are not legal in their country.

Categories: iPod, Tools

The following announcement is a shameless plug, I’m going to promote the new blog that I have created called DRM Alternatives. You will like the blog if you are fed up with the music industry and think that the relationship between artists and fans should be based on trust instead of mistrust which describes the current relationship.

Categories: Cool, Entertainment, ghacks

Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s iPod is getting some bad feedback lately. It turned out some months ago that shared songs, e.g. songs that you send another Zune user to his Zune, would only be playable for 3 days / times before they became useless. It did not even matter if the song contained DRM or not, all songs, even your own produced ones, would be limited to this.

Categories: Entertainment, Zune