DRM, Fair Use and Did Someone Miss the Point
By Dave Adamson in Reader
Posted in Uncategorized on August 29, 2006 at 8:43 am
So I read that a utility, freeware and easy to use, removes DRM from protected Windows Media files allowing me to strip the DRM protection from any of the WMAs that I bought from MSN Music and distribute them amongst my friends should they suddenly want to hear David Hasslehoff singing La Isla Bonita (I kid you not).
The way this is being reported, one would think it was a blow to those that want to lock up music files to one PC, one media player or one user. It’s being touted as a return to freedom of music whilst also being noted as a new method for pirates to… pirate.
However, there’s a few salient points here that confuse me slightly, so I thought I’d throw myself to the sharks here!
Firstly, if one of these nefarious pirates is going to be wanting to do illegal things with music in the first place, he isn’t likely to download DRM’d tracks in the first place and if, by some accident, he does, he’ll just delete it and find another one, surely?
Secondly, isn’t an easier way of circumventing DRM to burn tracks to CD and then reimport them? Okay, it’s a bit of a bind, but importing from CD has that funky feature where you can turn DRM on or off.
I don’t particularly like the concept of DRM. Whilst I appreciate that artists and labels have the rights to protect their music, there’s just something that doesn’t impress me about this particular method - something makes me feel that I don’t actually own the music that I’m buying if I can’t do what I will with it!
It’ll be interesting to see how this utility fares and how quickly Microsoft plug the hole. I’ll be interested in seeing how the music industry reacts as well, given that pirates cost that industry billions a year (I’m told). I do, however, find myself wondering if The Hoff would have missed the money that I paid for La Isla Bonita.
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My Aging Laptop
By Dave Adamson in Reader
Posted in Uncategorized on August 23, 2006 at 6:30 pm
I have a Toshiba Portege 3500 Tablet PC. It’s a nice laptop. 1.33 Ghz Intel Pentium-M, 12″ screen, less than 2kg, CF/SD slots, wireless, bluetooth, 16MB graphics card and 1GB of RAM.
Recently, I’ve been thinking of replacing the poor old thing.
The screen suffers from a common problem with the model where the digitiser has a “dead” area of about two inches running down the screen which means that I can’t reliably use it as a TPC, but I use it as a regular laptop and I’m happy.
I like the lightweight and the slim design (much jealousy to this day from fellow laptop owners who have larger, heavier and clumsier machines.)
It has no optical drive, however I’ve never had to install software or run a DVD “on the move,” so again this isn’t a problem. My external sits on my desk at work and I have one at home “just in case.”
I’ve upgraded the 3500. Firstly, the RAM went from up to 512MB, then 768MB, now 1GB, always shared with the graphics card. I’ve put in a new hard drive (40GB to 100GB) and a faster wifi card (a/b, to g) and even bought a snazzy laptop cooler which has brought the temperature down and, inadvertently, given me a more comfortable typing position.
Soooo, why am I thinking of upgrading? I want to do more with a laptop, I guess. I’d like to have more than 16MB of graphics card memory for a start! Why can’t I upgrade this? Why does this have to be built into the mainboard! Why haven’t the manufacturers thought ” If we make it mini-PCI then we could make a killing from the people who might want to upgrade their laptops that bit more”? After all, I could buy a new wifi card (mini-PCI) from eBay (okay, not like going into your local computer retailer but it did the job).
Oh hum, I’ll keep looking for another laptop… something with a 12″ screen and weighing under 2kg but not costing too much…
Until next time.
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I felt like an old person for the first time recently
By Dave Adamson in Reader
Posted in Uncategorized on August 21, 2006 at 4:32 pm
Hello everyone.
I’m Dave and recently I got a new mobile phone.
Now, I’d like to say that this was the first mobile phone I have ever had, this would clearly explain the problems I encountered whilst trying to use the super smart Nokia N91. Perhaps it is my advancing years (I turn 30 soon!) but I suddenly found myself completely and utterly flummoxed by how to send a text, how to change from upper to lower case and back again, how to navigate to find that function that I swear I saw two minutes ago. Then there was the joy of getting music onto it (where I ended up with two copies of every song because Nokia’s music management software played a trick on me), taking photos (of such thrilling things as my straight banana!), sending the first picture message and finding that it failed because, despite all the network branding and customisation picture/video/multimedia messaging needed to be enabled by other methods.
In the end, I’ve developed a level of comfort with my phone but I did find myself wondering if this is how end users feel when they are confronted with something new and unexpected; do they really appreciate our attitude when we just expect people to know? Wouldn’t it be nice if, instead of the responses of “read the manual,” there was some other way of picking up the information necessary to do what we do. After all, how many times has someone said to you “You make it look so easy,” or “How do you learn all of this?” Wouldn’t it be really nice if everything was really as easy as we make it look or, even better, that we admitted that, occasionally, we do struggle to learn things, instead of some of us pretending that we are some kind of IT Deity - I’ll explain this in a later blog, stay tuned, I’ve got plenty to say and plenty of misused punctuation to litter throughout my missives.
Take care.
Dave
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