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.
Remove DRM from your iTunes library
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.
DRM Alternatives Blog
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.
Zune does not allow to share all songs
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.
HD-DVD Encryption has been hacked
The war between Blue-Ray and HD-DVD is still in the beginning which frustrates the consumers. One nail in the Blue-Ray coffin might have been added today by a guy who managed to hack the HD-DVD encryption. Being able to backup the expensive HD-DVD movies could win the format war. Most users will not be able to backup their HD-DVDs right away because the process sounds a little bit complicated and the author of the code did not reveal all the information how he managed to rip a HD-DVD movie but the source is available which means that many programmers will take a look and create advanced versions of it.
How to remove the DRM from iTunes music
Itunes is the most successful music store in the world, if you do not count stores that have their office in Russia. One of the biggest disadvantages if iTunes is that the music that you purchase has DRM protection build into them. This protection makes it impossible to play those files on other mp3 players than the ipod for instance. This turns out really bad if you want to buy a new mp3 player which is not manufactured by Apple.
Movie studios vs. their customers Part 2
Just a few weeks ago I was reporting that Universal Studios was receiving it’s share from every Zune player sold and asked my readers to consider this before buying a Zune player because it could very well be the precedent of something that Universal, and other movie studios, wanted: A share of every media player that is being sold. Apparently they were quick to act.
How to bypass the DRM of Microsoft’s Zune
Every song that you send to someone else from your Zune is restricted to a limit number of plays before it becomes useless on the recipients Zune. This is really bad if you want to swap music files that you created on your own for example. There is however a (rather complicated) way to transfer files from one Zune to the other without those DRM restrictions. First you need to enable hard drive mode in your operating system.