tag archive: drm

I’ve been trying out some new music download options lately. I was happy to see that Amazon started selling non-DRM MP3 files for about a dollar each. I think a dollar is too much for individual song downloads, but I wanted to try it out and help show that people are willing to pay for unrestricted music even when it can be had for free.

Not totally unrestricted, of course. MP3 is still patent encumbered. I’d much prefer Ogg Vorbis. Ogg is free as in freedom and supposedly it is technically better, although my tin ears wouldn’t know the difference. And the name “Ogg” sounds cool. I’m reluctantly willing to go along with MP3 since I already have a huge library of MP3 songs and there are a couple of devices I use that don’t support Ogg. Sure, it may be coming off patent in a few years, but screw the patent holders. …

Just getting started on Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, and enjoying it so far, although this is a speed bump:

The biggest obstacle here is the understandable hesitation of publishers to make the electronic versions of their books available, given the devastating effect that illegal file sharing has had on the music-recording industry.

I thought the problem was more that the music industry doesn’t have a clue, and brought on their own decline by turning out mass-produced crap that surprisingly didn’t sell as well when more entertainment alternatives became available.

He goes on to discuss the growth of electronic readers:

The primary issue is going to be finding a secure means of making electronic information available. This is a fundamental concern for every level of our economy. Everything–including physical products, once nanotechnology-based manufacturing becomes a reality in about twenty years–is becoming information.
–Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, p55-56

Earlier in the book, Kurzweil discusses intelligence permeating the universe in a coming epoch of man/machine expansion, but I …

Finally, the big publication event. I present to you: free culture, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license, which I think is the best CC license.

Related background/promotional posts:

Part 1: Free Culture?
Part 2: Free Culture: An “Inside the Slush Pile” Exclusive!
Elsewhere: Now available at manybooks.net in a variety of formats!

Remember, this is all for fun (I hope), and: “If you don’t expect too much from me, you might not be let down.” I hope you enjoy the story.

Thanks to Gary for drawing the pictures on short notice and agreeing to release them under the same Creative Commons license as the story.

by Scott Carpenter
artwork by Gary Mitchell

The ship Folded spacetime, and in an instant jumped a thousand light-years to the next Possible. …

Originally published in Free Software Magazine.

No, not Winnie-the-Pooh’s friend, but that computer I mentioned last week. Do you feel cheated? Maybe you were expecting a murder mystery instead? Although Eeyore the donkey seems more like the died-of-natural-causes type. Let me briefly eulogize Eeyore the computer before wandering erratically to a new subject: copyright control.

Eeyore-the-Computer is dead

My plan to install Ubuntu on an old computer named Eeyore didn’t go so well. I finally sat down Friday night (I know: life in the fast lane) to give it a go and it turns out the machine is totally dead now. Disconnected all the drives and still couldn’t get to the BIOS. As is fitting for the worst fears of Eeyores everywhere, I just don’t think he’s worth the trouble of reviving at this point. Good-bye, my old friend.

I enjoyed this eulogy in …