The music industry could learn from this in a very positive way by either letting go of restrictions on digital content and concentrating on the sales of physical goods or it could work through the long list of people who shared and downloaded and sue em for stealing their stuff. I suspect the former could make the world a better place and would put a lot more money in the hands of musicians but the latter offers the incumbent power brokers and over-paid middle men a chance to flex their muscles and take some more cash with them on their way down. Human nature being what it is, we will probably see a very messy mixture of both.

Lets start with a look a the positive cues the ‘industry’ could take from what happened over the last few days.

• Many people shared links to Michael Jackson songs and video clips via their FaceBook pages and twitter ‘tweets’. My own house was filled with the sounds of his past work and conversations about everything from our likes or dislikes of the tunes, the impact of his dancing abilities on culture, the length of his trousers in that ‘Billy Jean’ clip to our own obsession with child protection and paedophilia. This is an important part of the healing process in my culture, which would be improved if access to the ’soundtrack of our lives’ were less entangled by record label executives and laywers.
• After the initial sharing of links to Michael’s work, the tone of my twitter stream changed in an interesting and important way. People started complaining about slowness in the iTunes store as they tried to purchase a more intimate experience, others proclaimed they had ‘re-bought’ CDs or albums they already own, still others complained that their local store was out of copies of the particular album they tried to buy while out shopping.
  

  This shows that people love to buy and own ’stuff’ (made out of atoms) and that free distribution of digital content (made out of copies of bits) actually leads to more sales.

• As a side note to the above point, it would be interesting to study the spike in sales of Jackson’s work (amplified by all the digital sharing) with that on the passing of Elvis Presley (prior to the ubiquity of digtial sharing tools). Hat tip to Blakey for his tweet –
• Being the father of two kids who could well end up making their living through musical talent, I think the current ‘get famous and drown in your own river of gold’ model the music industry has created is evil and at least partially responsible for the death of Michael Jackson. I hope my kids get to grow up in a world where they can make a decent living from their creative work, and be rewarded for contintuing to do so. With a bit of luck they won’t make so much money that they stop innovating, and hopefully never get so famous that they lose their sense of place in the world. Imagine what could have happened if Michael were not incarcerated by his own fame and the ongoing royalty stream for work already accomplished. I doubt that he would have felt the need to push so hard to ‘re-launch’ his career at age 50, clearly a major contributing factor to his early demise. Further, without acquiring such monstrous fame and deep pockets, he may have been free to pursue whatever personal quirks he had in the privacy of his own home.

Now lets put on our cynical costume and suggest some nasty implications of what might be that hopefully shed some light on the absurdity of current copyright laws for the digital age. Twitter and FaceBook offer great tools and audit trails to identify and prosecute the people who have been sharing links to Jackson songs. Since you don’t have to pay them for promoting this work (they did that for free), you can increase your profits by sue-ing them for demonstrably illegal activity (under current copyright law in many western countries). As I write, a *woman in Minnesota has been ordered to pay $80,000 per song to record companies for illegally downloading tracks and violating copyright laws.

• Lets start by working through each FaceBook profile with links to copyright material. Since profiles pretty much identify actual people, it shouldn’t be too hard to demand proof of obtaining permission from copyright holder then raking in $80k per unauthorised link.
• Since the links will generally be to centralised servers like YouTube or whatever it should be a piece of cake to count the number of downloads and either server the service provider or demand they give out the IP addresses of the nasty downloaders.
• Repeat the exercise for twitter (making use of the handy search.twitter.com), being careful to remove duplicates from those people who update their facebook status via twitter.
• Of course, it would pay to wait a while to make sure those who were inspired to go out and buy CD’s or records have done so. While they will be paying a lot less than $80k per song, every bit counts. On the slightly less cynical side, there is an absolute gold-mine of data in the tweets and facebook status updates that would make for a great ethnographic or at least market research study. Before I close this post and link to some of the supporting data, please let me vent my spleen on a slightly more technical matter.

Technical Rant – the internet works by making copies of tcp/ip packets (consisting of a collection of digital ‘bits’) and moving them from one computer to another. This copying is a good thing and makes the notion of ‘theft’ or ‘piracy’ utterly ridiculous for anything made out of ‘bits’. Every video you watch or song you listen to on your computer is a ‘DOWNLOAD’, there is really no difference between ’streaming’ services like online radio or youtube, direct downloads of .mp3 music or various video files or the Peer to Peer sharing and distribution of same. They all involve copying bits which get downloaded to your computer. Get over it. Stop splitting hairs. Dont get me started.

Supporting links and background info.

*woman in Minnesota has been ordered to pay $80,000 per song to record companies

• Moby’s blog:
  

  the riaa have sued Jammie Thomas-Rasset of minnesota for $2,000,000 for illegally downloading music.

  argh. what utter nonsense. this is how the record companies want to protect themselves? suing suburban moms for listening to music? charging $80,000 per song?

  punishing people for listening to music is exactly the wrong way to protect the music business.

• The Times online

A woman in Minnesota has been ordered to pay $80,000 a song to record companies for illegally downloading tracks and violating copyright laws.

A federal jury ruled that Jammie Thomas-Rasset willfully violated the copyrights on 24 songs, and awarded record companies $1.92 million.

• Cnet.com

Prior to last year, bankruptcy court would not have sheltered Jammie Thomas-Rasset from the $1.92 million debt she owes the music industry. But a decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco could enable her to walk away from the debt, several legal experts said on Friday.

• The inquirer

*the comments on this post show just how nasty people can be
The jury in Capitol Records v. Thomas-Rasset found that Thomas-Rasset willfully downloaded 24 tunes from the peer-to-peer filesharing service Kazaa, infringing the plaintiffs’ copyrights, and it slammed her with $1.92 million in statutory damages.

That works out to $80,000 per song, or over 200,000 times the actual damages that the recording companies could have conceivable suffered by the loss of those sales.

Tweets n stuff:

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

UPDATE
I’m staggered at the lack of discussion on either iView or that other nasty thing online, either in blogs or on twitter. Here are a few related posts:

• How to record iView content
• Caution: Videos from the ABC Shop are Defective By Design
• Internode announcement (back in Dec 2008)
• Minister’s office responds Re ABC shop DRM

OK, so I six months or so late to the party. That’s because the interesting content is starting to emerge now. Let’s talk about this!

BRILLIANT

My first encounter with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s iView service left me pleasantly surprised and way glad to be Australian. After seeing my mate Dave (LifeKludger) Wallace use it in anger at his place, I cranked it up as soon as I got home.

iView is easy to find & use (starts wtih a bandwidth test which gave me confidence to proceed and a pleasant surprise of confirmation that bandwidth would be unmetered).

• iView is UNMETERED (through Internode, my excellent ISP)
• content is good (a ‘rolling window’ of stuff I probably just missed from the telly)
• execution is slick (no login or signup, works on my old Mac and ancient PC)
• a bunch of value adds (RSS feeds, showcasing good content etc)

The only downside – it takes a bit of effort to download iView content in a format I can easily watch later or edit.

STOOPID

The ‘ABC Online Store – downloads‘ – a nasty looking place where I need to join up so I can pay for something much less than what I want (or already had via iView). Clearly the work of parsimonious laywers and accountants intent on saving our Government broadcaster a few pennies by SUBTRACTING VALUE while reducing exposure of great Aussie talent to the rest of the world. Thus ignoring the ABC charter to the detriment of our entertainment industry.

• no download option for content streamed via iView
• ‘Australian PC users only’ – (not exactly the demographic likely to fan the embers of our creative talent into flames in the global information economy. Couldn’t even browse thru content on my old G4 Mac – some mumbo jumbo about Silverlight Version 2)
• Need to create and account and sign-in so I can pay (I’m not against paying but you have to make it seamless)
• Silverlight2 and ABC download manager required
• Jerky playback with audio jitters on preview – FAIL
• Nasty T&C’s
• 7 day rental – oh please! (and I have to clean up the DRM infested files myself)
• DRM (Digital Rights Management) infected content

An upside – kudos to whoever decided to make the ABC Download Manager a P2P app (with uploads enabled by default). That might just help achieve what the podcast movement failed to do – smart / legitimate use of P2P. Good luck with that.

So, if the ABC’s ultimate plan is to offer free unmetered streams via iView for a while, then send us to the downloads section of the ABC store I might have to re-invest in my own recording setup. Quite frankly, I can’t be arsed!! (there is an ever-growing list of content on my iPod that I will never get around to watching – including some excellent TED talks, old DRM-free episodes of last years ABC shows, SBS, etc…).

I hope you get my point, even if it is somewhat over-emphasised. On the one hand iView is a BRILLIANT service that just works and provides value at zero cost – even for bandwidth, unless you are a Telstra BigPond customer. On the other hand the STOOPID ABC Online Store has to cripple the content and subtract value in order to enforce payment (to stop people ’stealing digital content’). I am certainly not against paying for something of value, even to the taxpayer funded ABC – so here is some free consulting on the types of thing I would be happy to pay for (preferably by an annual subscription or tax increase):

• Quality – DON’T infect the media with DRM, DO make high quality versions available.
• Metadata & transcripts – Imagine the possibilities for creative re-use of content that could occur if downloads were rich with metadata describing the content, time markers of key sections, maybe even verbatum transcripts. If you do this work, I get a better experience and our artists become more discoverable.
• Convenience – make it easy for me to find, subscribe to, get your digital content in whatever format I want, whenever I want it. If I’ve found something cool and started watching it in one format on one device – make it easy for me to instantly switch formats and continue on my merry way. Do the work for me, I’ll pay you gladly. Take my example of the Q&A episode featuring the Conroy magic filter discussed below – I found out about it on twitter, started watching it on my Mac laptop, thought I would finish watching it on my iPod touch in the tram but actually ended up listening to the audio while driving my car. I did go back and watch the piece where a viewer sent in a question via video and was inspired to mashup the response to that into my own video asking the pointed question – ‘If the senator and rest of the panel were surprised at the skills of that individual, why don’t they think about the damage a mandatory ISP filter would do to the competitive advantage of any such individual who decides to live in this country‘!!!
• Open licensing – You are the ABC for crying out loud! Show some leadership, negotiate open licenses, help the industry develop new business models fit for the digital age. Any creative works that cannot be re-mixed will dissapear from culture. Both the iView and Online Store teams should take a peek at the excellent work being done by the Pool.org people.
• And a whole bunch more that I don’t have time or energy to write down for people who probably don’t want to think outside the box.

An example:
Having started to watch this much tweeted episode of Q&A (featuring senator Conroy and his magic filter) at my computer, I went looking for a version I could watch on my iPod (and maybe mash-up later). *This led me to the ‘ABC Online Store – downloads’. Since then:
*http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s2521164.htm now has downloadable .wmv and .mp4 versions of this past episode. Phew – no need to feck with that horrible downloads section of the online store.

p.s. Most people like to buy STUFF. Stuff is made of atoms, not bits. Stuff like DVD’s CD’s hats, shirts, books, whatever – so by all means make the great Aussie content available to the entire world as stuff.

p.p.s. While I should have been finishing this post the other night, SBS aired an episode of insight featuring Sen Conroy and his magic filter. There was so much noise about this on twitter that I tuned in live and watched while tweeting (30mins later than my eastern friends). Turns out that SBS do a pretty fair job of both the streaming and download (including an RSS feed of downloadable episodes).

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

APPENDIX – My ABC Online Store – downloads experience via twitter:

• Realtime results for abc OR store from:fang

  0 more results since you started searching. Refresh to see them.

• 
  fang: resuming normal tweeting today after yesterdays ABC research and connecting ACROSS wity y’all as we connected UP to SBS #insight last night.
  1 day ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  fang: @dnwallace NO – only playable via ABC Download Manager (nasty system tray TSR that just wont shut down)
  1 day ago from web · Reply · View Tweet · Show ConversationHide Conversation
• 
  fang: SUCCESS! – can now play both my rented and owned ABC Online Store download shows. On an old pc at back of house.
  1 day ago from web · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  fang: please enter your ABC shop login to play video
  1 day ago from web · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  fang: Now ‘proud’ renter of an old episode of Denton for 7 days. Also the owner of something called ‘double the fist’ from ABC Online download
  1 day ago from web · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  fang: Great ;( ABC Download manager now wants DRM upgrade 0-> http://tinyurl.com/yclgxu (expand)
  1 day ago from web · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  fang: AH – ABC Download Manager is a little P2P app, currently 3% thru my 2 downloads. Guessing not UN-METERED, can anyone confirm/deny this?
  1 day ago from web · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  fang: Second checkout from ABC online download store – now cart is empty, looking for my downloads…
  1 day ago from web · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  fang: OK quit firefox, back to ABC download store, re-enter credit card and try again (hope I havent rented twice!) 14 days of DRM infestation-yuk
  1 day ago from web · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  fang: Got to end of ABC download purchase checkout, saved credit card etc, advised to look for two dots but still got 2 items in cart – doh!
  1 day ago from web · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  fang: Hit checkout button in the ABC download silverlight thingy – slick, entered address, now asking for credit card (hope its https) cant tell
  1 day ago from web · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  fang: back to the old PC to bludgeon my way toward first ABC Online store download purchase (or is that rental??)
  1 day ago from web · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  fang: ABC Download manager now installing on PC – lucky its not a laptop or I could break T&C by viewing content outside AUS ;-)
  1 day ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  fang: Pressing on with ABC downloads – signed up so could add old aunty jack show to my wishlist – fairly painless, well executed
  1 day ago from web · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  fang: Nasty, Nasty T&Cs ABC Online Store – DRM Infected, 7day rental, need download manager, must del files myself + pay for p2p up and download
  1 day ago from web · Reply · View Tweet
•  · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  fang: Oh yes, back to the ABC Online Store – cranking up old PC in kitchen
  1 day ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  fang: Exporting audio track of just purchased iTunes store Video for conversion to .mp3 while watching ye old track of many fond memories
  1 day ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  fang: Now trying to buy download for ABC Online Store – FAIL #1 – Silverlight v2 and G4 mac. Wanders down to kitchen to fire up old PC…
  1 day ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  fang: Now buying iTunes Video (possibly DRM infected) Caroline Live – Status Quo – all in name of research for ABC iView/Online Store blog rant!!
  1 day ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  fang: iTunes store – SUCCESS can haz DRM free .mp3 of Status Quo Roll over Lay Down – now purchasing excellent recommendation ‘Long Line – Angels
  1 day ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  fang: iTunes store hurdle #3 – after entering old password and updating credit card data my transaction just went away, re-starting.
  1 day ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  fang: Dear @internode, loving ABC iView unmetered streams via internode – but are the (DRM infected) ABC Shop downloads also unmetered?
  4 days ago from web · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  fang: Why is nobody talking about this? (ABC iView unmetered goodnes, $download DRM evil) http://tinyurl.com/66tneo (expand)
  4 days ago from web · Reply · View Tweet
• 
  fang: just chickened out on CANCEL my apple .mac account cos I don’t understand the implications for all the DRM content from the itunes store!!!
  8 days ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet

Here is a slide-deck closely related to the one Elliott used today.
creative commons through the looking glass

Thanks to Dush from Higher Ground for access to the sound – desk!

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

And that’s fine because I decide to ‘give away’ most of my rights to my digital content in the hope that someone will find it useful and re-use it to tell their story. No need to ask, just be polite and give me attribution (which Richard did by linking to my ‘mikeblogs‘ flickr account). That’s what:

cc:by or ‘Creative Commons – Attribution’ means.

• Sure, Richard could have made me look stupid – but I do a pretty good job of that myself.
• Sure, he could make money off that post – good luck to him, he did the hard work.
• Either way I gain more than I lose by having my work re-mixed into a new context. Had I licensed my work in a more restrictive way (say cc:by-nc-sa which means reuse must be non commercial and licensed in exactly the same way) it is unlikely that anyone would have found it, let alone re-used it.

I’m guessing here, but I suspect that Richard used the advanced search in flickr and decided only to look for images about ‘readwriteweb’ that he is free to use for commercial work, with modifications. Images licensed with more restrictions would simply not be displayed in the search results.

This is why only work that is freely licensed with continue to be relevant in future culture (but that is a rant too long for the short amount of time I have before sleep time).

Some other places you will find derivatives of my image:

http://fang.blip.tv/file/633462/ – a presentation that helped my create an excellent job
http://fang.blip.tv/file/105776/ – a mashup of Lessig and Downes that they have both seen
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikeblogs/323586161/ – my entry in a creative commons competition
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cambodia4kidsorg/306021623/in/pool-ccswagcontest06 – an entry by the winner of that creative commons competition
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cambodia4kidsorg/300492293/in/pool-ccswagcontest06 – the original image from which I borrowed the cc:frisbee
http://flickr.com/photos/31477768@N00/227948364 – my original hand drawn diagram
seyfang, mikeseyfang

Lambsy thinks the type of broadacre farming prevalent here in South Australia is sustainable because there is scope to adapt.

Leroy says we need to manage our water better, stop upstream rice and cotton farming but not build a desalination plant here in Adelaide.

Anne suggests a government buyback of water allocation would be better than costly engineering solutions to get the type of flows back from the Murray Darling basin that the environment needs.

The lobster might not be a water expert but is aware of local shortages and taking personal steps to reduce water consumption. (And gets extra kudos for being a good sport during the bootcamp by taking some some fake harsh criticism to demonstrate comments and trackbacks to the group).

Leighton reckons it is essential that our farmers change the way they operate, and that NoTill is the way to go. There is an interesting response to this assertion that incorporates everything from silver bullets to suburban lawns!

Michael makes an interesting point that regardless of the impact of climate change, the demand for output from crops will increase and that skilled farmers will find ways to adapt, driven by the market.

That IT guy writes about the inevitable evolution of farming practice but is really more interested in pictures than words. (I hope he finds a way to use blogs to share his wonderful images and suggest taking a look at creative commons licensing to make his work more ‘open’ and shareable).

And thanks for introducing me to photobubble – I love the way the help artists make money from physical representations (atoms) of their digital images (bits). The advice in their FAQ on ’stealing art’ is superb. For the record, my favourite is probably your ‘at hells entrance’ shot but I’ve included the image below because it fits with our theme of ‘future chaos’.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

Technorati Tags: litfuse0208

The talk has been published on blip.tv where you can go to get all the goodness, from files to download and make your own remix to versions you can watch on your favorite device or even stream to your computer.

Alternatively, you can download the half size (20mb) or full size version of the movie from:

• media.mikeseyfang.com/WIA-PostPitchfesMikeSeyfangTalk-Small.mov
• media.mikeseyfang.com/WIA-PostPitchfesMikeSeyfangTalk.mp4

Right mouse, save as the
Download (90mb) movie.

Thanks to all the folk listed in the credits for use of their digital work in the remix, especially Paul and Mark who provide large chunks of content and/or inspiration. Shout out to Mark and Shane and Michael for their surprise inclusion!

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

• We will have a decent sized target to test if good will triumph over evil with regard to openly licensed work.
• We will have a great role-model for those who want to know how to license work openly.
• I will feel all warm and fuzzy that my decision to license my work CC:By is on the right track (along with others like Beth, Leigh and many more).

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

• Cameron Reilly
• – http://blip.tv/file/get/Fang-CameronReillyAtPodCampPerth747.mp3
• Duncan Riely
• – http://blip.tv/file/get/Fang-DuncanRielyAtPodCampPerth2007273.mp3

If you find any more audio from podcamp perth (or boston) let me know and I will keep a list here for easy reference.

UPDATE:

• Nice list from Rich (all videos at this stage)
• Audio from Stewart (4 talks on one blog post) – Thanks Stew!

I’d be so grateful if Grum and Stew could find a way to share .mp3 versions of their most excellent videos. (I used up all my monthly bandwidth in the feckery required to produce audio from Duncan and Cam’s videos and there are six days till the meter starts over). Oh, and one more thing – the ‘no derivatives’ restriction on Grum’s CC license is a bit harsh, it prevents people like me from making mashups from them (and technically my act of community goodness in stripping out the audio is a derivative).
Fang – Mike Seyfang

By way of background let me confess that I am an Apple fanboy (from a User eXperience or UX perspective) and have decided to use the nearly seamless experience of purchasing a DRM infected file of a song I don’t like as the best practice benchmark. I’m also a radiohead fan and complete supporter of their destructively creative experiment with digital music business models – this post is purely a measure of the level of convenience of the purchase and download UX.

So, how was it?

• First hurdle was to overcome my fear of being DRM infected (so I waited a few days after release, asked some schookids, did a quick google). Decided that what I purchased probably would be DRM free but not real sure, and certainly no clue on the site. TOOK THE LEAP OF FAITH.
• The arty radiohead.com site sure lukes nice but offers very little in the way of clues as to what is about to happen.
• Hit purchase and was confronted by login or register – OK, one more online registration (annoying amount of mandatory fields)
• Now to decide the (OPTIONAL) price. After a quick conference with the kids we decided it was probably gunna be pretty good and that we should pay twenty bucks (we could always purchase it again if we felt compelled to).
• Currency Conversion – pounds is the only currency offered, there is a link to a dodgey looking currency converter so we tried that and decided on 8 pounds.
• After purchase you get a unique URL which kicks of the (rather slow) download process for the 48mb .zip. (I had some problems unzipping on my mac but it turns out the problem was between the chair and the computer – firstly didnt let the download finish, then tried to unzip to a drive with no free space – DOH)
• After that it was smooth sailing – a single folder with 10 160k, 44.1khz pure uninfected .mp3 files.
• Dragged em into iTunes, onto my iPod touch and burn to a CD for the car.
• One thing – there is bugger all metadata on the .mp3 files. Even tho the filenames indicate the sequence on the album, once in iTunes you are on your own in that regard – pity.
• Tracks seem to be in the right order on the ipod touch

So, how in(convenient) was the UX? I’m a fussy, grumpy old bastard and would say more inconvenient that convenient and certainly not seamless. By JP’s measure things will have to improve before web-scale can kick in. Imagine if I could have googled for ‘in rainbows’ on my iPod touch, puchased the song (with only a single existing password required to be entered), listen immediately then burn the CD for the car without having to feck around. When that happens we will have truly turned a corner.

p.s. Which DRM infected song I don’t like and why? The answer is in the smile on a young girl’s face in this youtube – she named the song, I found it in 2 seconds using the ‘itunes’ icon on my ipod touch over wifi – within 15 seconds she was singing with her dad – now that’s UX!

p.s.s. Even Apple fanboys can HATE DRM – check this rant, and I feel a new one coming on – having purchased a song over the air on ipod touch, how do I back it up to CD?? According to Apple, I should be able to sync it back to my computer and treat it like a regular store purchase. Can’t find any of the tunes I purchased from the ipod touch on my Mac…

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

technorati tags:apple, itunes, ipod, radiohead, inrainbows, download, music

Today I purchased a song from iTunes – and had what should have been a simple, straightforward  experience ruined by the cancerous spread of DRM.  I know it is the result of a simple bug or small clerical error but it justs proves how DRM policy enforcement always breaks somewhere (even in the DRM free zone of iTunes PLUS).

The short version is that I purchased what I thought was an iTunes PLUS (ie DRM Free) tune but ended up with a DRM file that I could not burn to a CD in time for the funeral of a close relative.

The long version:

Travelled to Pt Elliot so my wife Mandy could help her Aunty and Cousins prepare for the funeral of  Uncle Pete who passed away late last week.

Everybody chips in to help with planning etc, my job is to find a way to play Louis Armstrong’s ‘What a wonderful world’ at the funeral.

Being a fairly low tech affair I decide to try and purchase the song (DRM Free) from iTunes plus and burn a CD with at least two versions of the tune.  Up to my friends house with wifi, connect to the net, into iTunes, search the store and viola! – heaps of versions of the song to choose from.

But wait, let’s check to see if any of these tracks are available DRM free as ‘Plus’.

Notice the ‘power search’ button and check it out to constrain my search to ‘iTunes Plus’ as follows:

Now we have only 7 tracks available, but thats OK two of them sound promising.  SO I BUY BOTH.

Then the fun begins!

I ask steve for a blank CD but it turns out he has none, so, no problem we will buy some on the way to drop Mandy off with her cousins.  Find a shop, buy the CDs and think – Mandy drive, I can have em burnt by the time we get to Pt Elliot.

Crank up the Mac, throw a blank CD in, grab the playlist and hit BURN CD.

Then the fun begins ‘Unable to burn CD’!!

But how can that be, I’ve purchased DRM Free files fromm the iTunes Plus – or have I ?

Close inspection reveals, to my horror that I now ‘own’ two more DRM infected files:

Oh well, at least I can still burn these two tracks to CD for ‘backup’ under the DRM policy (even though I will have to become a criminal and break the agreement in the fineprint – because my intention is to play the tracks from a CD player, not the computer authorised to play them). 

But wait, there’s more!! – Cannot burn to CD because my Mac is not ‘authorised’. Try to convert the files to .mp3 – no go, try to authorise my Mac but cannot ‘authorise’ my Mac because we are now many miles out of range of an internet connection.

So, once again, I have purchased two DRM infected files that are both useless and have wasted significant amounts of my time.  Furthermore, I have lost confidence in recommending purchases from iTunes PLUS because who knows if this might happen to someone else.  I know Apple’s intentions with PLUS are good, but isn’t it interesting that this type of glitch can occur – and you won’t find anyone who as tried as hard as Apple to implement this stuff in such a way that the paying customer has a good experience.  But as Dave Slusher says – it just cant be done!  And now we have proof that the Cancer of DRM can even spread to services that try to provide DRM free music.

Not happy Jan (or Steve).

Fang – Mike Seyfang

p.s. Can anyone see where I made my error?

Is there a way to trade these two infected tracks for 256k non DRM PLUS files??

technorati tags:drm

It’s hard going but well worth a listen and ongoing conversation. I have run into the same pain points that Leigh describes in my work with LearnDog. Having done a few rounds of this conversation myself, I thought I would try to summarise some key points:

• cc:by (attribution) is a good starting place for open content in the Creative Commons world
• cc:nc, sa (non-commercial and share-alike) seem to ‘add open-ness’ but actually bring surprising restrictions in a number of circumstances
• things get really messy when learners and educators try to re-use (remix) content, especially when hosted on commercial platforms with intrinsic license constraints
• the whole debate could go away – if the default position were non-commercial sharing: as Stephen Downes has said about Creative Commons:

it shouldn’t be necessary; the default should be non-commercialsharing, while commercial ownership and use constitute exceptions)

Fang – Mike Seyfang