Free Republic

The 'Creative' Technology Behind The AP's News Registry from the magic-beans dept The Associated Press' attempt to DRM the news is a bad idea for a variety of reasons, but its claims for the news registry's capabilities seem pretty misguided, once you examine the technology behind it (the "magic DRM beans"). Ed Felten dug into the details of the registry's microformat, hNews, which the AP announced a few weeks earlier, and here's where it gets really interesting: the hNews rights field is based on the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language (ccREL). If the AP thinks it'll be able to build...

Shuffle's new hardware DRM taxes 3rd-party vendors Apple's new iPod Shuffle has added a new layer of hardware DRM, possibly preventing third-party companies from reverse-engineering the Shuffle technology in order to build headphones. Electronic Frontier and iLounge have discovered an Apple authentication chip DRM (Digital Right Management) requirement that will mean third-party headphone makers will have to pay fees for the authentication chip and design headphones with the chip included. The authentication chip provides a legal means to prevent headphone makers from reverse-engineering the Shuffle output to create a set of headphones that work with the new iPod. Apple could...

I was pitched headfirst into the world of e-books in 2002 when I took a job with Palm Digital Media. The company, originally called Peanut Press, was founded in 1998 with a simple plan: publish books in electronic form. As it turns out, that simple plan leads directly into a technological, economic, and political hornet's nest. But thanks to some good initial decisions (more on those later), little Peanut Press did pretty well for itself in those first few years, eventually having a legitimate claim to its self-declared title of "the world's largest e-book store." Unfortunately, despite starting the company...

Apple Inc. is dropping the digital copyright locks from most of the songs it sells through iTunes, a move that could prove to be a death blow for the music industry's attempts to control how consumers buy and listen to music. With the revolutionary iPod and the iTunes music store, Apple rewrote the rulebook for the music industry as labels struggled to adjust to the new digital reality of file-sharing and copyright violations brought about by the Internet. Today, Apple is the largest retailer of music in the U.S. with more than five billion songs sold and many will see...

In this opening salvo, I will reprise the technical terms and history of DRM and thereafter I will try to keep you abreast of the issues for computer users in general and free software in particular. Hopefully, I will in fact be chronicling the death throes of DRM. “The Skibbereen Eagle has it’s eye on the Czar”. Thus did a small, obscure Irish newspaper in West Cork in 1857 advise the Czar of all the Russias about his China policy. I like that. I like to think of the Czar, deliberating late into the night on high affairs of state...

Excerpt - If you like to download the latest episodes of “Heroes” or other NBC shows from BitTorrent, maybe you shouldn’t buy a Microsoft Zune to watch them on. A future update of the software for Microsoft’s portable media player may well include a feature that will block unauthorized copies of copyrighted videos from being played on it. ~ snip ~

Remember a few years back when Microsoft launched a new type of DRM under the name "PlaysForSure"? The idea was to create a standard DRM that a bunch of different online music download stores could use, and which makers of digital music devices could build for. Except... like any DRM, it had its problems. And, like any DRM, its real purpose was to take away features, not add them, making all of the content hindered by it less valuable. Yet, because Microsoft was behind it, many people assumed that at least Microsoft would keep supporting it. Well, you've now learned...

February 20, 2008 Hacker breaks link between iTunes and the iPod Software letting iTunes users copy music and video to mobile phones has been released by the hacker known as DVD Jon Jonathan Richards A notorious Norwegian hacker known as DVD Jon is preparing for another run-in with the music industry after he released software that lets iPod owners copy music and videos bought from iTunes and play it on other devices. The program allows people to drag and drop songs from iTunes into a folder on their desktop, which in turn copies the files to other devices such as...

DVD Jon aims to smash digital Tower of Babel By John Leyden The Register - Technology News - Tuesday, February 19 01:24 pm doubleTwist, the firm founded by scourge of DRM manufacturers Jon Lech Johansen (AKA DVD Jon) last March, has released software designed to allow users to share digital media files - including copy protected content - across devices. doubleTwist desktop allows users to "share and sync digital media without worrying about codecs and bitrates". The Windows utility will allow users to play a video made on a Nokia smartphone on an iPod or Sony PSP, for example. The...

One of the Big Four labels is apparently unhappy with its return on investment when it comes to funding industry trade groups such as the IFPI and RIAA. British label EMI, which was recently purchased by a private equity fund, is reportedly considering a significant cut to the amount of money it provides the trade groups on an annual basis. According to figures seen by Reuters, each of the Big Four contributes approximately $132.3 million to fund the operations of the IFPI, RIAA, and other national recording industry trade groups. That money is used in part to fund the industry's...

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry has taken up a new battle against pirates, but this one is different than previous legal pursuits. The UK-based organization acts as the worldwide arm for the music recording industry, but as widely reported, it apparently forgot to renew its .com top-level domain in time before it got snatched up by one of its top targets, The Pirate Bay. While the IFPI still retains control of ifpi.org, ifpi.com now points to a Pirate Bay page that reads: "International Federation of Pirates Interests." The two sides are now preparing for a fight over the...

Jesper Johansson--a former senior program manager for security policy at Microsoft who moved to Amazon in September last year--wrote in his blog on Monday that he may drop Windows Media Center for LinuxMCE, a free open-source add-on to the Kubuntu desktop operating system, because problems caused by Microsoft's digital-rights management (DRM) software have proven so difficult to fix. After Johansson's 5-year-old child complained that cable network Comcast's On Demand video system was not working with Windows Media Center, Johansson wrote, he attempted to resolve the problem. "Upon inspecting the problem I found that the video would turn on, the screen...

SEATTLE — Microsoft Corp. is once again on the defensive against hackers after the launch of a new program that gives average PC users tools to unlock copy-protected digital music and movies. The latest version of the FairUse4M program, which can crack Microsoft's digital rights management system for Windows Media audio and video files, was published online late Friday. In the past year, Microsoft plugged holes exploited by two earlier versions of the program and filed a federal lawsuit against its anonymous authors. Microsoft dropped the lawsuit after failing to identify them. The third version of FairUse4M has a simple...

San Francisco (IDGNS) - Under a licensing agreement in its final stages, consumers may get the right to make several legal copies of HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc movies they've purchased, a concession by the movie industry that may quell criticism that DRM (digital rights management) technologies are too restrictive. The agreement, if supported by movie studios and film companies, could allow a consumer to make a backup copy in case their original disc is damaged and another copy for their home media server, said Michael Ayers, a representative of an industry group that licenses the AACS (Advanced Access Content System)...

What do Vista, Flash, RealPlayer, and iTunes have in common? According to Media Rights Technologies (MRT), all of them are infringing products under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and MRT has just sent cease-and-desist letters to Microsoft, Adobe, Real, and Apple. "Together these four companies are responsible for 98 percent of the media players in the marketplace; CNN, NPR, Clear Channel, MySpace, Yahoo, and YouTube all use these infringing devices to distribute copyrighted works," said MRT CEO Hank Risan in a statement. "We will hold the responsible parties accountable. The time of suing John Doe is over." Media Rights Technologies...

There are a few things lawmakers have decided really ought to be handled with the "care and oversight" that only the government can provide: e.g., tax collection, radioactive materials, biohazards, guns, and CDs. CDs? No, I'm not talking about financial Certificates of Deposit, though that might make more sense. I'm talking about Compact Discs. New "pawn shop" laws are springing up across the United States that will make selling your used CDs at the local record shop something akin to getting arrested. No, you won't spend any time in jail, but you'll certainly feel like a criminal once the local...

Excerpt - The folks at Digg.com have let the social news genie out of the bottle, and now they can't control it. Since the HD-DVD encryption code was discovered and published, readers at Digg have been repeatedly submitting stories with the 16 digit hex code in the titles and bodies. Just as quickly as these posts crawl up the Digg charts, admins seem to be deleting them. Just search Google for 09 F9 and you'll find the key. Will AACS send a Cease and Desist to InfoWorld because I posted the text "09 F9"? If so, we might as well...

Yesterday, Apple sent out short notices to their iTunes partners who provide the music content to the iTunes store. The notices let partners know that they would soon be able to offer DRM-free music and DRM-free music videos to customers through iTunes. Many of you have reached out to iTunes to find out how you can make your songs available higher quality and DRM-free. Starting next month, iTunes will begin offering higher-quality, DRM-free music and DRM-free music videos to all customers. The new unrestricted format appears to be open to any publisher who is interested. Apple and EMI first announced...

April 06, 2007 (IDG News Service) -- Following digital music pioneer Apple Inc.'s lead, Microsoft Corp. said it will soon sell digital music online without digital rights management (DRM) protection. Microsoft's apparent change of heart on selling DRM-free music came in response to Apple's deal earlier in the week to sell unprotected content from recording company EMI Group PLC. The company previously claimed that DRM was necessary for current and emerging digital media business models. "The EMI announcement on Monday was not exclusive to Apple," said Katy Asher, a Microsoft spokeswoman on the Zune team, in an e-mail to the...

EMI recently announced it would offer DRM-Free tracks on Itunes for a 30 cent premium. This means people can copy the songs freely. But, does this really change anything from a legal perspective? It is still illegal to make copies of music.