Derek Roy

Blog #5

July 30,2009

Digital Rights Management

Digital Rights Management is a generic term that refers to access technologies that can be used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals to try to impose limitations on the usage of digital content and devices. Copyright laws clearly state if you make it copy right it because in a matter of days or even years someone can steal that idea but nothing can be done because of you not copyrighting. For music laws you cannot reproduce the music or lyrics, you cannot distribute the music or lyrics for free either for no-profit, or a profit, you also cannot perform the music or lyrics in public, cannot play a recording of the music or lyrics in public even if you own the cd. Recently a student was charged with downloading songs ,and sharing them for free via the Kazaa file sharing network . The case was similar to a trial last month of a women was ordered to pay her 1.92 million when she was guilty of infringement. Which she only downloaded 24 songs so that even out to be 80,000 per song to equal her 1.92 million she owes. Reminds me of The Pirate Bay Trial awhile back where the swedish court gave the co-founders a year in jail and were fined a large amount of money. According to this site the "customer is always wrong" itunes states "own it forever and a day" yes you might of bought all your music, movies off itunes but by law apple still owns it.

I mean copyright is a good thing i don't know if you agree but if i were making music, and i would defiantly copyright i wouldn't want people to find my music go out and play my songs, or actual music, and have them get huge when i was the one who wrote it to begin with. There's no what if i did do it etc. once you make something that you want to be yours you copyright it same goes for photographs as well. You'll need to fill out proper forms send to the copyright office, and also everything that your going to copyright needs to be sent as well.

Microsoft has decided that they are done supporting MSN music, and will be turning off the MSN music license servers by the end of the summer. All the people that have purchased music from the company thought they would never be faced with such an outcome after all they did pay for it. They will sending out license keys which will allow users to go in and retrieve the songs they bought you'll need a key for each of the songs. I think this is unfair to the customers to go in themselves and do ll this work what if you bought thousands of songs? We all know that that's going to take awhile. In my opinion they have all the customers information and they should of mailed them a check for how much money they invested in their product. Someone just got lazy. After so many complains by its customers they have decided that extend that deadline of what was August 31,2008 now they have until 2011 to make a determination.

This is not the only case of something like this Sony abandonment ATRAC music format caused the same problem, with paying customers forced to burn and re-rip music in order for them to save it. Sony said it would "phase out operations of its struggling connect online store, which sold songs in the company's ATRAC format" . The new walkman's will ship with Microsoft's windows media player 11 so it can play mp3 and ACC audio formats.

So in conclusion copyrighting is a very important thing that could make or break you if you don't act upon it. As goes for DRM check into some things and or reviews on what you using to get music, and to see if this thing will be around a long time so you don't have the same problem like Sony, MSN, Google. But keep in mind even though you bought it they still own it.

Also at this time Google refunded purchases of DRM-laden videos that were bought in the Google video store when that decided to shut down.