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The Economics of Music Sharing
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By Future Lust, Section Articles
Posted on
Tue Dec 2nd, 2003 at 12:41:41 PM GMT | |
Here is a heavy, but interesting, article on the economics of music file sharing.
A quote:
Every major label is drooling over the money-making prospects of having its own iTunes or Musicmatch. But they are all, in the immortal words of Johnny Cash, "born to lose, and destined to fail." Why? The music industry's problem is fundamental: the implicit contract between music companies and listeners is no longer viable.
The music industry fails to understand that a primary reason that consumers illegally share music files is that they want insurance against the music industry itself. File sharing is as much about risk sharing as it is about the theft of value. Technology makes file swapping possible - but the music industry's business model, which is at odds with the implicit contract it signs with listeners, is what makes it probable.
Read more
Discussion.. (2 comments)
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A Family Friend Experiences DRM; The Loss of Digital Rights
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By brainsik, Section Articles
Posted on
Tue Dec 2nd, 2003 at 10:19:08 AM GMT | |
From my blog, More Theory.
This morning, I received an email from a family friend. Recently, they joined the new Napster: a music service that lets you buy Windows Media Audio (WMA) music files of your favorite artist. Things went awry when they decided they wanted to listen to their music purchases on their Archos Jukebox MP3 player. The Archos player does not support WMA. They emailed me asking how they could play their WMA music on their Archos. They had tried software to convert WMA to MP3, but it failed. "Help!", they said. They didn't know the software they need is illegal under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA).
Why can't you just transcode the WMA file you paid for to MP3? Because WMA supports Digital Rights Management (DRM).
Full Story and Discussion.. (2 Kb in story)
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The Circle version 0.37a released
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By Anonymous Hero, Section New Releases
Posted on
Sun Nov 30th, 2003 at 09:07:03 PM GMT | |
Version 0.37 of The Circle was released today. The Circle is certainly the weirdest P2P around. Among the new features, an interesting "DRM" system. From the website:
"Although everybody can search your files by their keywords, you may choose which users are authorized to download them. An unauthorized third party has access only to the names of your files, not to their content. Needless to say, we expect you to use this system in order to prevent copyright infringement, while allowing private copy."
Discussion..
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eMule 0.30d Released.
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By LukeyBoy, Section New Releases
Posted on
Sat Nov 29th, 2003 at 03:34:00 PM GMT | |
Version 0.30d of the popular eMule file sharing application was released on November 28th. This is mainly a bugfix update with many small updates included - you may be interested in the ChangeLog.
Development of the application has slowed down as more resources are being poured into the new "Kademlia Testclient". The Kadmelia client will eventually supplant the traditional server-based system of eMule in favor of a pure peer-to-peer network. You can keep track of the Kadmelia development (as well as see the logic behind not using the Overnet protocol) in the eMule forums.
Discussion.. (5 comments)
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Winny author investigated, users arrested in Japan.
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By LukeyBoy, Section Articles
Posted on
Sat Nov 29th, 2003 at 12:58:35 AM GMT | |
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Three years ago an anonymous person known only as "47" created what has arguably become the most popular file sharing application in Japan, Winny. Today police entered and investigated his home in Kyoto and forced him to take down the Winny homepage. They also arrested two users of the program on charges of copyright violation. Google provides a cached copy of the Winny homepage.
Winny is/was a very strange breed of file sharing application based on Freenet. This case is alarming because Winny users were supposed to be anonymous.
One of the complaints against the users of Winny was put forward Nintendo.
Discussion.. (10 comments)
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OpenEvidence: the open source for notarisation
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By Anonymous Hero, Section New Releases
Posted on
Sat Nov 29th, 2003 at 12:21:49 AM GMT | |
Financed by the European community, OpenEvidence -part of European Project Group FP5- is an open source framework for data certification, time stamping and data archival that brings technology for evidence creation, validation and long term protection of documents.
Developers of France, Belgium, Estonia and Italy share in this project their technological know-how to build an architecture that can be applied to different business models like notarisation.
Based on standards ISO 17799, British Standard 7799, IETF PKI RFC 3161 and IETF PKI RFC 3029, standardisations efforts has been made collaborating with the LTANS IETF Working group, ISO (concerning time stamping standard), PKIX certificate validation protocols, DVCS update (RFC 3029) and ISO 18509.
A demonstration service of Time Stamping using RFC 3161 by C&A (Italian partners of OpenEvidence) can be used on its web site.
For more info about OpenEvidence:
http://www.com-and.com/openevidence.html
Discussion.. (1 comment)
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QtFairUse: Cracking iTunes' DRM
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By jcr13, Section New Releases
Posted on
Mon Nov 24th, 2003 at 08:15:40 AM GMT | |
QtFairUse extracts DRM-free AAC data from a DRM'd AAC stream as it plays in the Quicktime player. A Register article describes more of the details. Note that this is not tapping the decompressed audio, but instead actually tapping the decrypted AAC data before it gets decompressed. Thus, the DRM removal process results in no loss of quality.
A few caveats: the software only works for Windows, and the dumped streams are raw AAC without headers, so they cannot be easily played. QtFairUse is not quite ready for everyday use, perhaps, but it is at least a proof of concept.
This serves as another example of why "uncrackable" DRM in the real world is a ridiculous idea. If the sound plays through your speakers, it must exist in decrypted form somewhere in your computer's data path. If it exists in decrypted form, you can tap it and extract the decrypted data.
Discussion.. (29 comments)
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