Category: Music Industry

Apple: When is enough DRM enough?

Posted by DarkJedi – February 18, 2009

Coming from the company, who’s CEO a year back claimed that he would love to be able to provide music over iTunes without DRM, one could be surprised to see Apple’s latest claim: Jailbraking a phone is suddenly against the DMCA... Suddenly you find Apple siding with the likes of MPAA and realize one thing: Apple is only against DRM as long as they keep complete control of their customer and their market. The entire ecosystem around Apple’s products, from the iPod to the iPhone and iTunes are surrounded by guarding technologies that “protect” the customer against other choices than that of Apple. Meanwhile the customers are complaining widespread about DRM… A complain that apparently goes on deaf ears at Apple!

Naturally Apple gets its fair beating on blogs and criticism for being this arrogant on the DRM issue, but one would not expect them to receive a direct attack on this issue from Microsoft. However, Steve “Throwing Chairs” Ballmer apparent goes out criticising Apple for being a closed company… Guess it takes one to know one :)

It is, none the less,  strange to hear Steve Jobs talk about Apple as an open company, when their entire moneychain is built around fencing in their customers completely. In my opinion they should rethink their strategy and become an open company! But who cares?…. As long as there are customers for their fenced-in technology they will continue to build more DRM into their products!

Sony’s problem

Posted by DarkJedi – February 7, 2009

Red as blood. That is the only way to describe the latest numbers of lacking income at Sony. A company that once was at the top of the hardware business with enormous successes such as the Walkman, the Trinitron TV technology and the PlayStation 1 and 2. A hardware company that lead the business with innovation for many years. Now the times have changed and some might be wondering why. The answer, however, is painfully obvious… Sony is no longer one company, but rather a gathering of businesses with opposite directed interests.

The three faces of Sony is their hardware business, Sony Pictures in the movie industry and Sony BMG in the music business. The main problem appears, however, in their software department. While the hardware business is trying to create open, innovative hardware, the two content businesses Sony Pictures and Sony BMG is trying to prevent that hardware from being used in piracy. Here is where the customer gets completely forgotten. We then see failures such as the rootkit fiasco in their CD publishing part and the Walkman relaunched that was supposed to smash the iPod but failed completely because of unusable software as it was too ridden with DRM and copy protection technology making it impossible for customers to use. The Walkman’s price was slashed by more than half, but little did it help. The software was useless and people kept returning their Walkmans as they saw them as broken.

Sony, however, learned nothing from this. They still struggle with technologies that Sony Pictures and Sony BMG wanted to push in order to control their customers. Think of the many failed formats Sony has tried to push: ATRAC, MiniDisc, SACD, MemoryStick and so forth. ATRAC is a perfect example here. When the rest of the market had already accepted MP3 as the standard and Microsoft was pushing WMA Sony kept forcing their poor customers onto ATRAC and nothing else. After several years of being practically the laughing stock of the MP3-player market with a ridiculously small percentage they finally yielded to MP3 and released the Walkman player which could play both formats. However, the software was so riddled with DRM og copy protection technologies that it failed completely. Hardware is only as good as its software. Why didn’t they learn?

Even though music has been distributed over the Internet for nearly fifteen years Sony BMG and the rest of the music industry still hasn’t found a digital strategy. In this field Sony is also showing its many faces. It wants to give its customers as many options as possible, but also to completely control their use. This can be seen clearly in the fact that Sony is one of the companies pushing the hardest for the power to use selectable output – a technology that takes away a lot of the consumers rights without asking. So on one side Sony wants to push HD content in all your equipment – on the other side Sony wants complete control to fully disable all your equipment and remove the ability to display the HD content.

Then came the PlayStation 3 and Sony’s newest push of technologies. Now it wanted its customers onto the Blu-Ray path, so that it could force new copy protection technologies onto its poor customers. Another HD technology riddled with DRM. However, when one focuses too much on technology and marketing and forgets about software, which has always been Sony’s soft spot, one is set up for a major disappointment – especially when one is as arrogant as Sony Entertainment. The PlayStation 3 didn’t quite know what kind of machine it wanted to be. It wanted to be a game console, but also a media center and a Blu-Ray player… but as everyone knows: The Jack of All Trades is a Master of None… And that also happened with the PlayStation 3, who is suffering greatly on the market today.The holiday sales has shown that in this time around Sony is way behind its two competitors…

What Sony failed to do Nintendo did to perfection. They focused their console on a major market and didn’t put everything into the console – only what the market was asking for. The result is remarkable – especially compared to the once master of the market, Sony. Even their newest competitor, Microsoft, understood where they needed to beat Sony. Microsoft didn’t have Sony’s innovation in hardware or even remotely their experience in this field. When it comes to software, however, Microsoft is million miles ahead of Sony. They made the right tools for developing software on their platform and they made a brilliant working network service in Live far ahead of Sony’s PSN, which most of all looked like a small afterthought from Sony in hindsight of Microsoft’s success. Microsoft success came from ensuring a lot more titles than Sony did – especially when it came to exclusives, where Sony was once master. Sony simply forgot that consoles are about games. At the same time Microsoft is cutting prices making it harder for Sony to sell consoles, who are already seen as expensive…

Times has changed. Hardware is no longer everything. These days a console is measured by its software and in that field Sony is having serious problems – not only with its countless delays, but also with the quality of the software, which almost always fails to live up to the hype. A clear example of Sony’s problem with software is that every game studio claims that it is much simpler and thereby cheaper to develop on Microsoft’s Xbox platform compared to Sony’s PlayStation platform – even such former Sony exclusives as Square Enix.What is Sony’s response to this criticism? Well, even more strange… They claim that they have made it difficult to develop on the PlayStation 3 on purpose to make it last the ten years they somehow expect this console to last – even though it is far behind all its competitors in every way… sheeesh!

The strangest thing about this is that Sony doesn’t seem to learn anything. They keep on lying through their teeth and spinning numbers in their marketing. They keep on screwing their customers with DRM and copy protection and the removal of consumer rights, using lobbying. One would think that a company that makes a PR nightmare like the CD rootkit would learn something, but it doesn’t seem to happen. What Sony needs a common sense czar…

Digital Music or Digital Protectionism

Posted by DarkJedi – January 25, 2009

For many years the digital sales have only gone one way – up and up! Consumers wants an easy to use music and movie download service that just works. iTunes is already doing what the music business should be dreaming about. Alternative earnings are hitting the music business from unexpected sides, such as the console market. Most businesses would be happy in such a situation. In the midst of a financial crisis they have upcoming market with unlimited potential, but how are they reacting now that they haven’t done anything to spur this development for more than a decade?

Well, not very inspiring to say the least. The Greedy Business ™, consisting of the Big Four in the music business, IFPI, MPAA and the likes of those, instead wants to crumble the rights of the Internet users and expect special threatment on the Internet. They want complete monitoring of the Internet – and naturally they do not want to pay for it. For some reason they expect the tax payers to pay for monitoring themselves in order for the Greedy Business ™ to misuse this monitoring for protecting their market. They are dead scared that the powers of the market is shifting and they want to use fear and money to pull their weight around to ensure that no one starts making money on innovation in this business.

In the mean time the Greedy Business ™ are spending their time publishing papirs on Internet piracy to get some support to their “take-control-over-the-internet”-scheme. Naturally these papirs are as filled with errors as the one would expect from these blind managers. They simply doesn’t know the rules of the scientific world and instead are just proving how little truth they have in what they claim instead. Perhaps they should invest all that energy into innovation instead – might be a welcome change!

The problem for the Greedy Business ™ is perhaps that they simply weren’t ready for the realities or for the fact that most business have to actually do something in order to earn money. Instead they just kept on claiming that it was the pirates’ fault – not theirs. They did nothing to better the situation – just kept on complaining! What a normal business would do in such a situation is to change ones strategy (or actually make one in this case), not act like a spoiled child and start suing your customers thereby ruining your market of tomorrow. However, the Greedy Business ™ kept on acting like idiots without an idea in what direction they wanted to go and showed no understanding of what their market demanded what so ever!

Even when it is going perfectly in their sales in the midst of a financial crisis they keep on crying piracy … Won’t you guys just shut the f*ck up and die soon?!

The Console War : Sony – Please grow up!

Posted by DarkJedi – November 19, 2008

Just because you cannot seem to offer anything of value, especially concerning films and HD-content, on that “mediacenter”console of yours, please stop acting like a spoiled child!

We all know how you tried to market the PlayStation 3 like a center of HD content and we also know that your PSN doesn’t contain anything of value and absolutely nothing of HD value!

Instead of blocking Microsoft’s excellent attempt at providing what you have failed to do, please start making your own attempt at delivering something of value to your customers.

It is simply a childish act and shows that you can’t be trusted to run both a music, movie and game business at the same time without getting your childish feelings hurt and instead screw your customers. It’s enough just to see how you handled the enormous amount of Sony product-placement in a James Bond film, but this?

Seriously, Sony, grow up – and fast!

UPDATE: … And so they did (for the time being :) )!

And note to Microsoft: “Please join the digital age soon!” !!!

Greedy Business ™ – The Alternative to “Three strikes and you are out!”

Posted by DarkJedi – August 9, 2008

The French are heading the wrong way, the English have already went down the path… many are soon to follow. The path is one let by the Greedy Business ™, consisting primarily of the music industry, led by the Big Four, and the movie industry and their mafia-sides, the RIAA and the MPAA. The path is one, where a household is denied access or have highly reduced access to a resource that the entire world is dependent upon: The Internet. This lifeline to the outside world, which is essential for todays life on terms of work, information search, social access and exhange with the public sector, is being threatened… And for what?

The music industry earns billions upon billions every year – even though they haven’t adapted or at least their business model in more than 60 years. Imagine that in any other industry? Imagine if the hardware producers had done the same. Rejected the Internet outside their control completely. None of their goods were to be sold outside a physical store in their complete control. They would have surely died. Imagine if the authors had sued Amazon out this world for selling tons of their books online and tried to disable the internet because they found a book online that had been made illegally available? Such thoughts are today unimaginable and still the Greedy Business ™ tries to do this. The ridiculous thing about their attempt is that politicians listen to this.

Lets make one thing perfectly clear: I’m against illegal copying of copyrighted or otherwise protected work… but I am not against copying, information freedom, technology advances. File copying is not automatically illegal downloading. Torrents does not equal illegal download, but an excellent technology that could be used in many different contexts. The Internet is way past the hour where we can just start to disable people’s access to it. It is simply a human right. Why do I say that? Well, as long as the Greedy Business ™ sees nothing on the Internet but illegal copies everyone agrees that it isn’t beneficial to keep. However, in the same moment we call out for the “Three strikes and you are out” adaption we also critize China for not allowing its people free access to information through the Internet. Perhaps soon China will come out saying that they are just regulating against illegal copying and everything will be allright then?

The main problem facing the Greedy Business ™ is that they are no longer functioning as a free market, where the forces of the market regulates. If it had been the case then one or more of the Big Four would have adapted to the Internet more than a decade ago and perhaps even sooner than that – offering people an alternative they were clearly asking for. Take a look at how many portable media devices being sold every year. Then try to go out and find a service that can offer them the media they want, regardless of the platform they have at home (Windows, Linux, Mac)? There are none! Then take a look at what the Greedy Business ™ does offer (after being forced to try something)… Complicated stores, filled with forms that needs to be filled out, again and again, slow download times, extremely low bitrates and quality, DRM, DRM and DRM… and for the same price as you can buy the physical alternative! Don’t try to explain those prices! They simply has nothing to do with the cost of production – as it would in a working market.

If you started to see where all the money goes inside the music industry you would be appalled – and they know this. How come a CD costs the same as a DVD? You cannot try tell me that the price of production is the same for making 12 small tracks of music compared to a large Hollywood blockbuster involving several major stars and thousands of people involved. Then comes the price of a downloadable version of an album cost the same – and should I be so stupid that I wanted to pay for a tune for my mobile phone the price would be one fifth of the entire album. Don’t tell me that it is representing the true cost in any way. It represents that too many people needs to earn too much money inside this great pyramid where the musician sits at the bottom… An entire industry build up of managers and lawyers that imagine a world that cannot live without their product and therefore keep claiming that they must be loosing money to illegal downloads because every person on Earth doesn’t buy a CD every month, like they did in the 80′ies. Could they only offer some real proof of this, instead of the lying, bullshitting statistics they publish now and then, which are always shot down immediately as being at least of factor of 3 over the top or outright lies…

Instead of focusing on making music they are now spending their time on two things: suing their customers for illegal downloading without proper evidence and spreading lies about technology they do not understand themselves.

The conclusion is simply, if you think of it. Technology doesn’t stand still – people sometimes do, however. What we have is a disfunctional industry that needs to die and be reborn immediately. Instead of trying to disable people’s access to the Internet we should instead disable the Internet access for the Greedy Business ™. This would solve all the problems. They don’t need the real world to make their statistics anyway. Then when they have come up with something that acutally moves technology and the Internet forward, instead of back into the Dark Ages, they should be allowed back on. Now, all I need is a politician that wants to listen to the people and reason, instead of listening to the money of the Greedy Business ™.

Greedy Business ™ : Throwing bad numbers around

Posted by DarkJedi – April 27, 2008

When the music CEO’s are lining up to claim that “The times are changing” they are all wrong. The times has already changed, the entire eco-system around the music and movie industry is already in the new times and has been for a long while. The new generation are frantically leaving the old format in the dust, choosing instead the digital alternative and this development is going fast. Meanwhile the Greedy Business ™ is still acting like we were in the times of old, fighting to put one non-userfriendly DRM out after the other – everyone of them broken before ever entering the market… This attempt to control their customer and the customer’s needs and uses are failing miserably and often ends up in publicity scandals that can never be amended after the fiasco has gone public, like the example of Apple’s latest Quicktime DRM that ended up ruining your entire system, while trying to lock you into a single vendor. Just imagine for a second that any other industry tried to lock a consumer into a single vendor? They would be judged by the court and forced out of the free market immediately!

After a decade of darkness in the minds of the Greedy Business ™ ’s CEOs they finally started to realize that calling your customers pirates, suing your customers while at the same time locking their systems full of DRM might not be the best way to win their hearts. Then Apple along with EMI launched DRM-free MP3 music on iTunes and suddenly Amazon followed with the two more of the Big Greedy Four. All that was left was Sony, who still couldn’t believe why the others would ever want to abandon DRM. After pressure when every blog and newssite on the planet had written about the DRM-free campaign from the other three Sony decided to make their own “DRM-free” option. However, true to Sony’s way of handling their customers it was an extremely poor and difficult way to implement DRM-free, which forced you into a physical store, thereby removing half the incentative. Why would Sony ever want to implement it in such a horrible way? The answer is simple: It is the only way to “prove” that DRM-free doesn’t work. If their silly “DRM-free” attempt was a fiasco they could go out and claim that people didn’t want DRM-free and that the Big Greedy Four should go back to DRM – ensuring Sony a good deal in royalties for their tons of non-functional DRM-schemes.

The main problem the Greedy Business ™ is now left with is their legacy from this decade of DRM and customer-hating. Many analysts predicts that DRM especially will haunt the Greedy Business ™ for a long time. Meanwhile the Greedy Business ™ continues to sue its customers, however meeting a lot more resistance now! The problem with companies like RIAA/MPAA is that their only interest is to make the customers of the company that pay them look criminal – how did anyone ever expect a business model like that to work? EMI has already seen the problem in this constellation and are asking RIAA what it is getting for its annual 250 million dollars, while being prepared to leave the RIAA should their response not fit the bill! RIAA is in dire straits already for showing sides that the music industry shouldn’t like too much. RIAA itself is for some reason not ready to pay artists anything even though they claim to this in their behalf – nor do they ever expect to do this… Why should anyone pay them then? Why not pay directly to the artist that has been exposed to piracy? At the same time they are eager to stay in control in their role as gate keepers and constantly battles individual and independent artists to keep them and the Big Greedy Four in control of the entire music industry, which is also something that would never be allowed in any real free market. Their public announcement often creates hate among music customers and clearly shows that they haven’t got the slightest basic understanding of how a free market should work or what their customers want – or even what they are actually doing!

What is more of a problem is the fact that these “organizations” react so differently which has become painfully obvious in the many lawsuits against college students in America these recent years. The approaches and understandings of RIAA, MPAA and the TV-series are so different you wouldn’t think they even know what they really want – apart from more money. When their lawsuits hits prime news sites like Businessweek with a story of a poor mother who is innocent and who fights back against the Evil Empire ™ of RIAA and the cursed music industry it is a PR nightmare from day one. Of course with their lawsuit approach they are sure to create hate towards the entire industry from the next-generation consumers, which shows their understanding of business. How could the CEOs of the industry miss this? They are once again left with a PR nightmare, which they leave to their owners to clean up, while they still claim their annual wages for ruining the future market for their owners.

If they instead started to look at statistics – instead of “inventing” them – they might see that pirates sometimes actually help companies sell more products… A concept no CEO in the Greedy Business ™ would ever come to understand with their 1980′ies way of thinking. They haven’t even reached Web 1.0, while the rest of the world is ready to leave Web 2.0 and go forth.

What strikes me as particularly inconsistent is how RIAA for example handles its money. They claim to be doing this on behalf of the artists, who pay them quite handsomely to do this horrid job. On the other hand RIAA wants to use a method of pay themselves they refused to the webcasters, while at the same time doesn’t actually go out and support the song writers who is claimed to be their first priority. The RIAA is suppose to be the best lawyers the Big Greedy Four can get, but why are their methods then called into serious question? The same methods are called into question when it comes to the BSA, who are actually forcing companies to turn away from the software-producers who pay the BSA and turn to open source solutions – loosing them for the long run! A company like MediaSentry also quickly removes the earlier proof that they were using illegal methods from their homepage showing that all these companies are breaking the law to “uphold” what they consider to be a righteous cause! All in all these companies are no better than the mafia – and until the Greedy Business ™ understands that they customers will continue to hate them – continuing this PR nightmare!
These days are interesting days. Especially when a hacker found his way into the Media Defenders company and proved that companies like RIAA knows that their actions have zero effect on piracy. This is interesting as it proves that the RIAA isn’t actually working on the side of its employer, but rather is trying to stack up money for themselves while laying to their employer. And what would the BSA do when they see companies like Sony caught pirating software themselves? Sony are refusing to make amends, even though they have forced thousands to do this in a similar situation. How come they only respect copyrights and patents when it helps their own cause?

What are they even doing in the courts? The obvious have absolutely no sense of how to act as a lawyer or how to prove their desperate cases, clearly proven when the RIAA “expert” witness was deemed “borderline incompetent” by real experts in the courtroom, while all their “proving” techniques was called into serious question as well… Why do the Greedy Business ™ hire these guys and pay them so much money for being incompetent? They expect nothing in return, do no real statistics or analysis and still expect customers to buy from them after being sued!

When they cannot win in the markets or in the courtrooms what do they do then? Well the obvious answer if you lived in the 1940′ies Germany or in China today would be to secure a law that indoctrinates the next generation about their view and their view ONLY on file-sharing – ignoring all technological progress made the last two decades all together at the same time. Thank god I live in the real world … and not a country where a new law can make it possible to demand 1,5 million dollars per copied CD – even though no physical pierce has yet to be stolen and all evidence can be falsified digitally! Naturally such a law is made while a large company like Wal-Markt goes out saying that they will no longer accept the far too high prices on CDs as they are experiencing that neither will the customer! Of course a good CEO would know such a thing – if they didn’t read the statistics of companies like MPAA, which are at least a factor of 3 exaggerated and so are those from the college piracy numbers, which they have already admitted!

The grotesque part in this is that even though they are lying wildly and they admits it the CEO’s do nothing. They do not act on this, like a normal CEO would – and therefore they are lost in the digital race completely! The companies are offering no real alternative to piracy. Even the dumbest CEO should know his numbers so well that when he sees that the two biggest piracy nations of the world, China and Russia, bring down their piracy numbers and it doesn’t affect the CD or DVD sales, which continues to fall that this is not a major contributing factor! What a good CEO would do then is to find the REAL contributing factor – instead of relying on statistics that has already been proven false from day one! An industry led by so poor leadership is doomed to fail – and they will… sooner than those poor CEOs will ever realize!

Greedy Business ™ : Money & Control – Part Three

Posted by DarkJedi – January 5, 2008

In this part we take a look at the technologies that the Greedy Business ™ brought into this world and what have happened to them. Then we are going to discuss the future of the Greedy Business ™. In terms of technologies I am of course thinking of Digital Rights Management or DRM, which was an idea for keeping control of exactly what people did on their computers. First of the idea was introduced as a way of ensuring themselves against piracy. Naturally it didn’t affect piracy the least, or it can be argued that it did in fact even do the opposite. Pirates suddenly offered goods that were far higher quality for the consumer than what the Greedy Business ™ did. When the Greedy Business ™ discovered that their technologies didn’t work they found a different usage for this particular type of technology. Suddenly it was suppose to enforce the rights of the content owners, limiting how people used their computers, and then it quickly became a question of time before the Greedy Business ™ saw it fit to sell the rights you previously had for free now for a large fee. That meant that you no longer could make copies to yourself, in example for your car or on your portable music player, and they even went as far as to claiming that it was now illegal to do so. However, technology was not something that the Greedy Business ™ had any comptence at and their futile attempt at has always gone horribly wrong. In a matter of days or often even before released those technologies were already overruled. An example of their complete incompetence in this field can be seen in a recent case from the MPAA, where they released a toolkit to monitor everything on the universities. This toolkit was not only illegal software to use for the MPAA, but also allowed everyone from the outside to see anything inside the universities – a major security hole. They simply lack a complete understanding of the world of IT and could be outmanuevred by a nine year old in most fields of expertise here.

What they completely failed to understand was that DRM in fact had an impact – it was just a negative one. One example is the PC gaming market, which is slowly being killed by DRM technologies. So what the Greedy Business ™ is actually doing with their technology is ruining their future markets and offering an ideal situation for the pirates. Why they couldn’t see this is beyond my understanding. My guess is that they simply wasn’t ready to accept that their old way of distributing, which has not seen change in more than 25-30 years, was threatened and they needed to renew. This is seen clearly in the way the Greedy Business ™ have handled every new attempt at a renewed digital distribution model, which they have been extremely efficient at overtaxing and overlicensing.

While they were busy shooting down every alternative they got and kept throwing bad technologies that took basic rights from the digital consumer it soon became apparent to everyone but the Greedy Business ™ that this might backfire big time. You can’t expect consumers to keep buying your products when you are screwing their rights, their computers, their products and then suing them all the time… Most people would understand that! Of course what you would do if you lived in Nazi germany in the 1940′ies and had such a situation is to create your own news and create fake facts wrapped in propaganda, so that is exactly what the Greedy Business ™ are doing. The funny thing about this propaganda campaign, that is suppose to take the heat out of the consumer backlash, is that it actually admits that the RIAA and the entire music business is not giving the consumer what it wants.

Meanwhile the loathing of DRM continues around the world. Still it is only at the consumer level. Governments doesn’t understand the problem. They can’t see why DRM will never work, as their understanding of IT and technology in general is as fair behind as the Greedy Business ™ are, which means that governments in general buy the crap that the Greedy Business ™ are saying. Even after the complete fiasco of Sony’s rootkit, with another one on the way, they still allow themselves to be taking around the bush by the Greedy Business ™’s lobbyist. Of course you cannot expect every educated human to be as stupid as most politicians and therefore IFPI’s sad attempt at trying to extort the universities into teaching only the view of IFPI is going horribly wrong. They somehow can’t see the problem of making this non factual propaganda in schools as a problem – maybe we should send the entire Greedy Business ™ to China and let them see what the outcome of onesided brainwash is? And it is not the only place where they try to push their incorrect perception of the world and their propaganda into. Report after report, filled with incorrect statistics and erranous analysis on the “losses” caused by piracy comes out of the Greedy Business ™ press month after month.

As of late though an entirely different problem is hitting the Greedy Business ™. The musicians, whom they represent, have had enough of suing their own fans and incapacitated fan’s computers with badly made DRM. Sir Paul McCartney has already spoken up, talked about the many problems that the industry is facing and how they acted completely wrong, when faced with such challenges. You can even hear rock stars claiming that the fight against piracy was already lost in 1997, but they are still fighting it like it was 1997 and with that use of DRM they will just create enemies for themselves. With the artificial high prices customers are forced to pay for inferior products, filled with DRM, they will turn to piracy. Especially since pirates have understood how to make it available and easy to get – even for people who are not technic minded. The band, NiN, also agrees that the prices of CDs are simply too high and that people should pirate their songs! This is a bold statement, but there is a hint of truth in it. Compare the investments in making a full motion film to that of making a CD album. There are far many more people involved in the film and it takes far longer, requires far more equipment, and still the price of the two products are almost the same, when comparing a CD with a DVD – why? While it may be a bold statement by NiN Radiohead took it a step further and went public with their latest album without a record label and even let their fans decide what they wanted to pay for the album! Claims are that Radiohead has already earned around 6-10 million dollars on this distribution model – and they don’t have to share it with a thousand and one lobbyist, lawyer or boss at the Greedy Business ™.

Well, why don’t the big four then start to sell music without DRM? According to some stores DRM-free music outsells the protected tunes in a ratio of four to one… Fear, I guess! It took a company in trouble to see the light… EMI, when faced with dire economical problems and no buyer, needed to get a foothold in this new reality. Suddenly they began to understand that the future is digital and depending on CD sales will ultimately fail. Out of the blue comes the initiative… Suddenly Apple is offering DRM-free tunes on iTunes – rocking the boat again – together with EMI. This suddenly gives EMI an amazing sales boost on iTunes – even on old songs. Amazon cannot lets this go by and soon after signs a deal with EMI, where they want to offer high-quality, DRM-free music. Suddenly Walmart enters this arena as well and now the game is on!

Sony BMG is still sitting behind like a stone, refusing to see reality, like they always have. They are still wingshot at the fact that Apple did with ease what they failed at miserably in retail. Their latest attempt at digital distribution with Crackle is way beyond embarrassing and clearly shows why Sony will never become a software-centric company.

Meanwhile the writings continue on the wall with CD sales continuing to decline and digital music sales continue to rise! This causes the Greedy Business ™ to try and blow an ember of life into their dying goldchild, the CD, but this desperate last attempt already looks like a failure on all counts. What Apple and EMI has begun on iTunes with DRM-free music is already starting to have an affect on the big four… DRM is threatened!

Suddenly Universal shocks by not renewing their iTunes contract, but only to test an alternative way of distributing DRM-free tunes without Apple in charge. The real reason they wanted to leave Apple and iTunes behind is that their greed got the best of them. They wanted a cut of every iPod sold… It is not called the Greedy Business ™ for nothing! They just want higher prices and more money – the only reason they went for DRM-free! The chief of Universal shows just how greedy they have become…

In the meantime the CEO of Warner Brothers suddenl and might I add FINALLY, realizes that their anti-consumer campaign might have helped P2P networks and hurt their own business. Welcome back, sleepy head! This is the first step towards DRM-free tunes from Warner Brothers, and it doesn’t take long before they also went the same way as EMI, leaving Sony as the last of the big four to stay behind on the DRM-only wagon!

After being the last company in the universe to see the light Sony BMG finally yields to pressure and goes DRM-free as well. With Sony into the fields of DRM-free tunes the future for DRM in terms of music is suddenly looking bleak. This could mean that Apple will finally have to relinguish some of their power in the digital music distribution domain, which they have controlled with ease and DRM. I don’t know if the big four made their move out of their deeply burried holes too late, but time will tell..

Of course this is only in the music business – the problem of DRM is still a heavy issue in terms of movie and films, where embarassing moments such as this clearly shows why the amateurishness of DRM needs to go on all fronts! They may not realise it yet, but the writing on the wall is clear. DRM is loosing the battle…

What to expect from the future then? Well, the business could start by looking at what is done right for once. Take a look at what function piracy really fulfills, like using it for giving away free samples, which is a cheap altenative to hyping and expensive marketing! The change is coming, and those that aren’t going with it will die! The business needs to go back and treat customers like customers and do like EMI has done – leave the RIAA/IFPI and start offering people what they want instead! DRM will be gone, perhaps already next summer for music… Now what digitial distribution model will be chosen is too early to say, but it needs to be nurtured, not overtaxed or overlicensed. This will be the salvation for the music business and later the movie and game business… The sooner the companies embrace this change and the future we live in the better they will survive. Times will be difficult – the transition will be hard – but listen to your customers and you will survive! In order to earn money in the future you need to release your control…

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Greedy Business ™ : Money & Control – Part One

Posted by DarkJedi – September 18, 2007

In this three part analysis of the music and movie industry we take a closer look at an industry who is with fist and hands struggling its best to stay in the eighties and to prevent the future in arriving and to hold technological advances at bay have sold out their customers and their own future instead…

For a long time the battle between the consumer and the music/movie industry has grown ever stronger. The industry, in this blog called the Greedy Business ™, have shown by their motives and actions over the years that they simply lack a basic understanding of a free market and of the basic concept of a consumer.

The problem grew enormously in strength when file-sharing over the Internet slowly became a popular technology. Suddenly the Greedy Business ™ found themselves in stalling market position and what easier conclusion was there for them than “It is the Internet’s fault … Everybody is a thief … We have done nothing wrong! Let’s start suing everybody!”. Of course they started propaganda campaign after propaganda campaign trying to justify their lack of realism. Many of these “truths” about file-sharing was riddling with incorrect information, loads of misinformation and outright lies.

The basic assumption of the Greedy Business ™ is that technology should always answer to them, meaning that no good can come from them loosing control of the market to a better technology, like it has happen in almost every other market on the planet. The problem for the Greedy Business ™ is, however, that many, including politicians, are starting to ask a difficult question: Does file-sharing technologies slowly render copyright obsolete? Everything has been done easier with technology over time – apart from the movie and music business, where lousy, cheap DRM-schemes ruin the experience for people. Instead of a competiting market with better products for cheaper money just take a look at CD-prices, which haven’t changed for fifteen years or cinema tickets which have only increased, while the product has not in any way been improved.

The problem of technology hindering, like the Greedy Business ™ is trying constantly with DRM is that it removes consumer rights without compensating them. Then comes the question of Fair Use… Even though politicians state clearly that some fair use is a right the Greedy Business ™ simply goes out, like an emperor, and proclaims that it is not a right, but a service that can be purchased from them. Thank you, oh, God Almighty! “Pay us, we need more money!”. If they only had real analysts they would realize that Fair Use is actually good for the economy, but all they can see is “Pay us, we need more money!”. Naturally their action towards the foolish consumers who think that they should go on enjoying a bit of their products without giving them 107% compensation is to gather more companies into the Greedy Business ™ and try to strengthen the copyright laws into removing even more consumer rights – in a market that is already failing because of such restrictions! “We want more control!”, yes, thank you – we know!

One of their “new” laws amendments should be to ban all DVD backup and require the original disc to be placed in the drive. Well, good for you! In a time where the DVD sales are failing, not because of the content, but simply because it is a thing of the past and consumers want more digital content with better uses and easier use they propose to go back into the stone age and require you to use your disc! Why? Naturally so that you wear the disc up faster and go and buy a new one! Backup – not needed… Just buy a new one! “Pay us! We need more money!”. Naturally you can’t get your amendments through the army of politicians if you happen to have a couple of politicians who doesn’t see your point of view – but that’s easily “fixed” in the world of the Greedy Business ™… Just call them pirate politicians and claim that they are illegitimate thieves – that should help! “We want more control!”. I can certainly understand that – who, in their right mind, would want a politician they can’t buy?

Not only are the Greedy Business ™ trying to limit our rights as consumers, but they are also creeping into our home everywhere, like through your newly bought operating system, Windows Vista, or your newly bought Blu-Ray player, which is literally filled with DRM from A to Z. Now their latest failed attempt at “containing” illegal file-copying is a crappy pierce of software called AACS, which without any explanation from the Greedy Business ™ takes your CPU-time and creates overhead in your computer and offers you no advantages as a consumer, but you have to implement it. It is no longer you who control that device which you have paid considerable amount of money on, store your confidential documents on … just to be able to play movies on it in this time and age?! “We want more control!”.

The most tragic part of it is that this DRM, like any other DRM-attempt before it, doesn’t work! It bugs your computer and prevents you from playing legally purchased or user-generated content, but it only bugs those who haven’t done what is considered illegal in many countries, which is to crack it. Had the Greedy Business ™ only been equipped with a brain capacity of a degenerated four-year old they would see that the pirates, who they “supposedly” fear with their lives, have already cracked this DRM, and what remains is hassle, privacy concerns, bugs, a slowed down computer and no advantages to the person who is playing it legit. The most comical part of this whole DRM-failure is that the consumer will get, without question, the best product, if selects the product from pirate, who offers him the quality and content with no bugging DRM attached.

This was the first part of the market and industry analysis of the stoneage people at Greedy Business ™, in Part Two we will look closer at DRM and at how it has failed completely, alienated customers and started the revolution for a digital age – an age in which there is no room for the Greedy Business ™ and their complete business model will ultimately fail…

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Greedy Business ™ – Digital Rights Menacing

Posted by DarkJedi – May 14, 2007

Let me start this post by summering up the conclusion of the recent months: The reign of Digital Rights Management has seen better days…

Since the classic battle for keeping customers in line back in the Napster lawsuit the Greedy Business ™, consisting of major parts of the music, movie and software industry, has been trying more than hard to force DRM down into the consumer’s throat. The music industry back then was faced with a problem they and their expensive analysts could not account for: Their sales were declining… Something had to be wrong – It couldn’t be that their distribution model or their quality has faltered… Only one thing could come to mind in their heads: The consumer must be doing something bad! They started pumping tons and tons of DRM into their productsas they seemed convinced for some reason that this would eliminate piracy or reduce it to a bare minimum… Now ten to fifteen years on and how did the strategy fare?

Well, they are still seing declining sales and after thousands upon thousands of lawsuits against their customers they have also completely lost consumer trust. Even though the numbers are staring them in the face they still cannot see it. DRM has reduced piracy by 0,001 % at best. My guess is that piracy is actually doing much better today than back in the days of Napster. What happened to DRM then? Well, it left the average consumer back in a frustrating situation: He buys the CD or DVDs so he helps the declining sales, but he cannot get his versions to work correct because of DRM and looses interest in the product. Meanwhile the pirated versions provide an option you cannot find the legal market anymore: High quality music without technical hazzle or restrictions on use!

How does for example RIAA, as a glorified member of the Greedy Business ™ react to this situation? They watch the music business’ revenue slump year by year, but see absolutely no result on their work. However, they can still not see the picture – not even after more than ten years! They have not tried to search for a different answer in all that time. Even the most damp of analysts can see that most of their declining sales numbers can be explained by the “Single Effect”, but nevertheless they regard no other option than to sue their customers and place bad products on the shelves for the legal market as the only choice. In most analysts outside the Greedy Business ™ it is clear as broad daylight that the Greedy Business ™ is having dire problems with album sales and cannot find an alternative distribution model to account for this loss. Even though DRM has not even been succeeded in stopping a single pierce of music from reaching illegal distribution channels the Greedy Business ™ still pursues the way of DRM, like there are no alternative.

Another problem arises when you have entire industries, like the Greedy Business ™ represent when talking about the music and movie industry, that cannot fathom the technology and how to harvest its new possibillites. While others were quick to see the potential of the Internet and its amazing use as a distribution channel the Greedy Business ™ first tried to have the entire Internet shut down instead. Instead of understanding and taking advantage of a new technology like Internet Radio the Greedy Business ™ completely messes things up with a radio tax that will utterly destroy the technology and leave behind another vacuum in a place where a possible distribution channel could have been created. Furthermore RIAA goes into the case and suddenly poses as the only authenticated place get money from the collected Internet Tax – even though they do not represent many independent artists that are played on the radio. And who who want to be represented by the company that got the vote as the worst company in USA in 2007? Not exactly what most upcoming musicians think of good publicity for their fans… Like RIAA the MPAA of the Movie Industry is just as slow and complacent about new technologies. The great fears of piracy has let the MPAA to slowly destroy the once great experience of going to the cinema – an experience the movie industry shouldn’t want to loose as the sales of DVDs are set to drop dramatically from now on, as the battle for the next-gen DVD is still very unclear and far from consumers. Every day new technologies appear that can open up new markets, like BitTorrent, but the first thing the Greedy Business ™ does is to try and stop it. The father of BitTorrent has been known to say that he thinks the current DRM technologies are destroying new technology like BitTorrent.

Meanwhile the technology firms continues to come up with newer and more expensive copy-protection schemes, that has one thing in common with all the DRM schemes that has come before it: It will be cracked with days and will not prevent a single pirate from pirating a DVD or CD… Sony’s latest attempt at a DVD DRM scheme proved to be so useless that the DVDs could not even be played on Sony’s own DVD players! Luckily because of their long history with malfunctioning DRM schemes, containing rootkits and other malware, Sony was for once quick to recognize the problem and fix it… The constant reign of trouble that Sony has been causing with their DRM schemes over time has quickly made the company one of the most hated companies on the Internet. The most discussed DRM today is AACS, that was claimed to be impossible to crack, like many other before that. Once again we see history repeat itself. In the same manor in which the DVD protection scheme, CSS, was published all over the Internet like wildfire and made copying a DVD a trivial task for most users, the next-gen DVD formats like Blu-Ray and HD DVD can now be copied thanks to the Internet distribution of an AACS crack code in Hex. The most interesting part of that tale is that it showed how little people wants DRM as a revolt suddenly appeared on the social newssite Digg, when AACS LA tried to remove references to the hex code. It is my guess that this revolt will create an even more polarized world, which is quickly becoming us versus them – and that’s not exactly the kind of publicity and public relations the movie industry should go for, when they are desperately trying to win consumer over to their next-gen DVD replacement in a time where they need the sales to go up, instead of down.

While DRM continues to be made and shipped to unknownly consumers who struggle with it daily another battle is raging in the courts, where the Greedy Business ™ is busy suing their customers. It can be a pretty daunting task to sue your customers when you your understanding of technology and IT is several centuries old, like RIAA’s “expert” witness in one of their court cases. Their methods in court are often comparable of those used by the mafia, and even judges are starting to tire of this misuse of their authority and their methods. The problem of going to court is that even though you spend half of your development budget on lawsuits against your customers you might end up with a court ruling that goes against your wishes, like one the latest court ruling against the DVD consortium where the judge actually approved of DVD copying. The worst part about court rulings is that when you loose a lawsuit you leave yourself open to countersuits. Currently RIAA is having major problems with countersuits and furthermore being accused of copyright misuse at the same time. In the mean time in another court RIAA is being accused by the judge of lying in court. In another attempt to rol in some money for the needy executives of the Greedy Business ™ they have decided to start a propaganda campaign and a massive launch of lawsuits against college student across USA. Luckily some of the Universities doesn’t bend over to this oppression and have instead chosen to counter-sue RIAA for waste of time and ressources on their part. One could only hope that this would prove how ridiculous their claims and logic far too often is. Unfortunately some politicians doesn’t have a single analytic part in their brain and buys this propaganda without questions, calling the Universities “A wretched hive of scum and villany”. One that buys the numbers issued from the RIAA/MPAA without questions certainly doesn’t qualify as intelligent in any way. Especially since it is by now a wellknown fact that the MPAA has been caught lying on numerous occasions. And for the Greedy Business ™ to start this campaign? Well, it sounds like a perfect business plan: To ensure that their current largest market segment is sued into hell… Makes good sense! Just like the business plan is sound when you sue a ten year old girl with a disabled mother or a stroke victim…. The Greedy Business ™ have misled themselves and they have ended up with a completely screwed up image of their customers. It isn’t always a good idea to try and act the hero against the “evil pirates”. Especially if the Greedy Business ™ themselves doesn’t mind pirating from others. The “antipiracy” strategy of RIAA/MPAA of using lawsuit upon lawsuit against their customers are backfiring big time now. The situation has become so tragic that one can only ridicule the Greedy Business ™ for not altering the strategy immediately.

The discussion of DRM is slowly moving into the public spectrum as more and more people are affected daily and with it times are heading for a change. The wind of change can be seen, especially with the latest development on the DRM stage… The closed DRM system employed by Apple in the iPod/iTunes distribution model has been getting scrutinized by the European Union as of late. The European Union and especially Norway and the other Scandinavian countries will no longer accept such vendor lock-in by DRM from Apple.

It is clear to many now that DRM has nothing to do with stopping piracy. The Greedy Business ™ can read numbers as well as I can. It has always been about controlling the market, controlling the consumer. In terms of software we can see how Microsoft has become a market leader and quickly become a master in forcing people to get DRM into their products and then been quick to use this power to control the market afterwards. The concept of DRM and its current appliances has been dealt a hard verdict by the Economist and by now it should be apparent to everyone in the industry that even though they thought DRM could wield the market for them it will never become the new distribution model they hoped for. For too long have the Greedy Business ™ used it to keep control over markets and kept a distribution model alive that should have been replaced more than a decade ago. The Greedy Business ™ found that instead of going with innovation and giving their customers what they asked for, like a normal market player would do in a free market, they chose to misuse the law – and especially the DMCA – and sue their customers into hell in their thousands. Luckily it has been proposed that a FAIR USE act should be applied to the DMCA, which of course meets fierce resistance from the Greedy Business ™ that fear that their army of lawyers, which by now must be around 80% of their workforce, would end up loosing each and every case and in the end become unemployed. In the meantime another problem for the Greedy Business ™ have appeared in the EU, where a proposal is preparing to allow personal copying and filesharing, where there are no profits made. This sort of embrace of technology and progress is the direct opposite of what the Greedy Business ™ wants to do. In their wretched minds they want more DRM and it should be more restrictive, like the AACS, to give them more control over the consumer and the entire market. They do not see the problems that DRM causes, like the fact that the current DRM schemes is killing legal BitTorrent movie download and thereby destroying an emerging market, or the fact more than 75 % of all customer problems are caused by DRM. They only see profits, not customers, which they regard as cattle – nothing more! Attempts have been made to try and explain DRM and the problems that it is causing to executives in the business, but little understanding is met – only profits matter… They have completely failed to realize that what they actually did with their DRM iniatives was to alienate their customers!

There are plenty of bad signs in the industry that they still don’t see what they are doing, but lately something has happened. Major artists are deciding to go the non-DRM way and head for the new dsitribution model, instead of swelling in the past. The MPAA chairman has been out saying that he promises free DVD copying and interoperable DRM. These are good signs in a bad time, but the major light at the end of the tunnel is the result of the pressure EU has put on Apple because of their Vendor Lock-in DRM in iTunes and the fact that EMI is in financial trouble and needs a change in their distribution model. This was the perfect match… A company like Apple with a new and popular distribution channel that has proven its worth and a member of the Greedy Business ™ in dire straits that wants to make profits. They have announced a deal that means that EMI’s music catalog will be available without DRM on iTunes as of this summer. This move towards the end of DRM and higher quality in digital music is seen by many as the way forward and back to the consumers for the Greedy Business ™. There has already been many reactions to the deal between EMI and Apple. There has been speculations that Apple has been taking too much credits for this move, which is essentially EMI’s exclusive decision. However, there is no doubt that this deal is having repercussions throughout the entire market. Amazon is preparing to launch a DRM-free music service to compete with iTunes, Microsoft has suddenly expressed interest in selling DRM-free music… Suddenly the world is turned upside down! One cannot escape the past, however, and Apple and Microsoft has been caught in battle by another company, that are using their own weapons against them. Apple, Microsoft and many others of the DRM-pro team, who has helped the Greedy Business ™ by inventing, implementing and forced DRM into many of their products are suddenly sued for not using DRM, in accordance with the DMCA. I could not come up with a better twist than that – especially since the DRM-pro team has used the DMCA together with the Greedy Business ™ for long to suppress other companies. Most companies will soon see that DRM is heading for the end of its lifetime and alternatives are suddenly examined. With countries like Norway seing that we need modern laws that allows filesharing in a modern society it is only the completely consumer-blind companies like Warner Brothers that firmly stick to DRM these days. Of course Warner Brothers gets ridiculed for this by more modern company leaders, like Robertson of MP3.com. Of course one could ridicule Warner Brothers, but why bother? They are only saying this because they can no longer innovate and find an alternative. One should instead ridicule a company like HBO that wants to change the name of DRM to make it sound more positive! No positive spin will make the consumer see why all their good money is spent on a product that doesn’t work, costs a lot and allows you to do much less than the free one offered by the pirates! The change is coming and only the non-innovating companies like Warner Brothers and HBO will be left behind. Later they will see, like Sony did far too late with MP3, that the consumer still holds the key to profits and they will be in dire straits…

The most interesting part is about to happen… Apple is about to renew all their contract with the content-providers on iTunes. It will be interesting to see how the repercussions of the EMI deal will affect those dealings. My guess is that Warner Brothers will soon find themselves to be rather alone on the matter of keeping DRM alive without non-DRM alternatives on iTunes… Once again Apple is holding all the cards, some dealt to them by EMI and the rest by the amazing performance in terms of sales that iTunes is generating. At this point in time, with no alternative on the new distribution channel, companies like Warner Brothers will be left in the dark without Apple – and in the dark no profits are made …

Statue of Liberty

Greedy Business ™ : Holding Back The Future!

Posted by DarkJedi – March 1, 2007

Most people like the improvements technology brings to us over time. Most companies are locked in a ever-lasting struggle to come up with new technologies and improvements in order to stay in business. Most of the world unfortunately doesn’t apply when you talk about the four big music labels and the movie industry. In that small part of the world I like to call the Greedy Business ™ rules doesn’t apply anymore. While everyone else knows that there will be a new day tomorrow and therefore prepares for this it is not the case with the Greedy Business ™. This industry instead tries to hold on to a time long gone by now, while their sales flourished and they had complete control of the market… No matter what they themselves believe they cannot hold back the future – it is coming!

The Digital Future is now… Actually it has been here for many years! MP3-files aren’t the newest invetion on the block anymore, neither is the Internet. The coupling between those two should easy have made it into mainstream markets long ago. Instead companies like Napster and KazaA made wonderful search engines and distribution channels that made it incredibly easy to find the music that you wanted. Imagine if one of the big four had done just that: Made a program as easy to use as KazaA or eMule, that allowed you to enter your creditcard information and then to find digital music in MP3 format as easy as typing in a string and clicking download. Then at the end of the month they would send you a mail telling you which songs you have legally bought and therefore own and charge it to your creditcard. They would have made the market explode over a few years. Imagine iTunes-ease coupled with no DRM! If they were even smarter they would use BitTorrent-technologies to distribute to save their bandwidth – a technology they have been fighting for years, like any other peer-2-peer technlogy instead of taking advantage of it.

What are they doing instead? They are offering DRM-infected music and poorly converted videos for a high price! The entire Greedy Business ™ completely missed the picture. They never understood the possibilities of the Internet and they ended up completely failing their digital strategy (once they finally got one!)… Instead of taking advantage of new technologies for reaching new markets they have chosen to try to kill the digital revolution with DRM and expensive products that give consumers much less for their money than the physical product, which has not been innovated the last 20 years!

The problem they are facing now is that in their complete misunderstanding of the digital market they have crippled the market in such a way that now only the pirates can offer what the customer wants to pay for – and they are giving it away for free?! The best example was AllOfMP3, who a offered DRM-free, format-independent choice of music in a shop that was easy to use and with a price tag that people were more than happy to pay! Naturally their prices were too low to make enough profits for an industry such as the Greedy Business ™, but higher prices than that of AllOfMP3 would also have been a big success anyway. This misunderstanding of the customer’s needs leave the consumer in a situation where the only content-provider that can provide what the digital market requires is the pirates!

What does the Greedy Business ™ then do? Examine their markets? Make analysis on what people want or demand? WRONG! They just ensure that law-makers make strict copyright laws that keep people locked in the past by the DMCA, preventing the real revolution of the digital age by preventing the content to enter the digital age. Now they are trying to export the only product they are willing to give away for free: The DMCA! Well, there is always work for lawyers and lobbiest in the greatest “democracy” in the world :)

In the mean time politicians are considering a fair use amendment to the DMCA to allow the consumer of the digital revolution to flourish. Well, naturally the Greedy Business ™ fights this attempt at an amendment with every claw and army of lawyers at their disposal! You wouldn’t want the consumer to be granted freedoms that the Greedy Business ™ has taken away from them, when you want to be able to sell every freedom for large sum of money time and time again, would you?!

While this battle rages on an industry such as the Greedy Business ™ needs to ensure that there is order in the ranks and enough lawsuits going to bring in some cash for this “starving” industry. Therefore they are currently deploying their mafia methods on college students in order to force these digital consumers of tomorrow back into line by what in any other industry would be called extortion! This of course stirrs some outrage, like every other attempt at mafia methods from the Greedy Business ™ has in the past. The time of social networks is now and they are starting to react to the outdated tactics of the Greedy Business ™. Everything from a manifesto against this outdated industry to programs that allows you to avoid ending up buying content from these lost-in-time content-providers.

Then came the rumor that EMI had started talks on allowing MP3-downloads from online music stores … Music without DRM! Of course this was all a publicity stunt and everyone should have known that! Instead of embracing the future they stick to old-school methods like demanding upfront payment from a business that doesn’t have large margins like the Greedy Business ™. Were they ever to give the money back if the sales went up? I would guess not! This is no different than the protection money you loose to your local mafia, but hey, that’s where Greedy Business ™ learned their “trade” in the first place :)

Considering how many analysts are employed in the Greedy Business ™ (which is of course nothing comapred to the armies of lawyers constantly employed by this industry) it is strange that they have never examined what their customers think about DRM. It doesn’t take a long time to find out what the general consensus around the Internet generation is – just search for DRM in Google, Digg, Technorati and so forth… Why haven’t they learned anything about DRM? Not even when Steve Jobs goes out and tries to blame someone else for his vendor lock-in technologies do the Greedy Business ™ see the light! The Greedy Business ™ has simply ended up clutching on to a technology that the customers doesn’t want, and instead of changing a distribution model that hasn’t worked for a decade, like they would in any normal industry or free market, they keep believing that DRM is the new distribution model… Well, guys, let me say it again: A Distribution Model without customers isn’t a Distribution Model – It is a suicide note! … Welcome to the future!

Statue of Liberty