Copyleft: the magazine

We’ve been anticipating this one for sometime, but Phil Schiller just announced in his MacWorld keynote that, by the end of the first quarter of 2009, the entire iTunes catalog will be DRM-free. This puts an end to six years of DRM on Apple’s iTunes and iPods, though it will still likely be in the proprietary .M4A music format. Furthermore, it reflects the new realities of the music industry, where the record companies have finally recognized that downloads are far more important than physical media and consumers won’t put up with their music being locked up in absurd digital “rights” regimes. We just want to play songs without interference from the people from whom we legally bought them.

In other iTunes news, Apple will also be introducing differential pricing for the first time, with song prices ranging from $0.69 to $1.29. It has been reported that iTunes is already offering to upgrade people’s libraries to DRM-free versions for $0.30 per song. So go forth and liberate your music library!

(via Engadget [1],[2] and CrunchGear)

Update: The ever vigilant Cory Doctorow notes over at Boing Boing that this new DRM-free announcement only applies to songs, not audiobooks or videos. While we at Copyleft: the magazine concur with Cory’s concerns about the continued encumbering of non-music files on iTunes, I think it’s a huge step just getting the music industry to accept DRM-free music. The film industry and traditional publishing are a bit behind the learning curve here, and are going to continue to be skeptical of DRM-free online sales. But, hopefully, they’ll learn more quickly than the music industry did now that they have a solid case study of how an industry can fail by applying DRM and the success that industry will have now that downloads will be nearly universally unencumbered.

Borrowing aspects of Hungry Hungry Hippos, Creative Commons’ promotional materials and McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto, the Free Culture Game by La Molleindustria has succeeded in doing what few have tried: simplifying the complexities of the debate over intellectual “property” into a flash video game. Your job is simple, just use the blue copyleft symbol to feed an information hungry populous fresh ideas from the Commons before the evil “Vectorialists” pull those ideas into the Market and rot the brains of your little people with copyrighted, commoditized ideas (turning them into grey automatons, it seems). Overall, the game play is relatively simple and keeps you on your toes, particularly for a game that’s so obviously an attempt to push ideology.

The Free Culture Game: only you can save the world from mind-numbing copyrighted content.

While we here at Copyleft: the magazine are all for attempting to change people’s perceptions of intellectual “property”, it is clear that the Free Culture Game has its downsides. It clearly promotes the theory of the Commons, that the free flow of ideas will create more innovation while commodification of information stifles creativity. However, the game definitely simplifies the idea of copyright, stigmatizing a concept which is, essentially, the basis upon which Creative Commons licenses are based. Without copyright law, there is no way to enforce Creative Commons licensing (or GPL, GNU or any other of the myriad free licensing regimes out there right now). So, while we applaud the effort as another fine attempt at cultural hacking (and a well crafted time waster), we wish there was a better attempt to push people toward more solid information, instead of putting something out there that, if the RIAA had done it, we would have immediately labeled propaganda.

(via Boing Boing)

In a move that has riled even the most levelheaded of bloggers out there, Microsoft has decided to shut off the authentication servers for its dead MSN Music service, essentially flipping the bird to anyone who bought music from them. The nuts and bolts go something like this. PlaysForSure requires an authentication key to play music files and you have to have a new key every time you move a file to a new device or computer. Without the servers, which are expected to be shut down on August 31, consumers will no longer be able to move music to their portable audio players or any other PC, essentially condemning them to leaving the files on whatever computer they bought them on. This includes making it impossible to play that music if you upgrade your OS as well (possibly to Linux, just out of spite). That’s right, the DRM scheme that promised to be better than iTunes (but just barely) by allowing you to move your music to a bunch of different music players now can’t even do that. The only option, as Ars Technica pointed out, is the same bad one that is available to most people stuck in a bad DRM nightmare: burn all your music to CD, then re-rip. Weak.

(via Ars Technica and Wired)

For those of you who have a penchant for pre-Outlook e-mail clients, the folks over at Mozilla have a treat for you. Eudora has been resurrected from the not-so-dead and, with the blessing of Qualcomm (who owns the rights to the venerable piece of e-mail software), Mozilla has relaunched it under the code-name “Penelope”. Essentially, Penelope is Mozilla’s Thunderbird e-mail client with a user interface that looks like Eudora. Best of all, it is all open sourced, so it will be free for all (in both the money and rights sense of the term). Of course, there are plenty of other skins out there for Thunderbird, but Eudora does have a certain late 1980’s je ne sais quoi. Qualcomm has publically stated that all future versions of Eudora will also be open source, so there’s one more open and free alternative to proprietary and buggy e-mail software (you know who you are).

(via MozillaWiki and the Washington Post)

We’re big fans of OpenOffice.org here at Copyleft: the magazine, and it appears that we are not alone in our open source office software love. Combining the pure open sourcey goodness of OO.org and its own Lotus Notes code and branding, IBM launched Lotus Symphony this week. The software suite (get it? “Symphony”… “suite”…. it’s funny!) includes three apps, Lotus Symphony Documents, Lotus Symphony Presentations and Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets, which are equivalent to OpenOffice.org’s Writer, Impress and Calc and Microsoft’s Word, Power Point and Excel. As with OO.org, IBM is letting you have these free of charge (though it looks like you have to sign up for an IBM.com account). These “productivity tools” are also being fully integrated into the latest version IBM’s popular Lotus Notes.

Perhaps just as important is IBM’s adoption of the OpenDocument Format (which both OpenOffice.org and Google Apps also use). Given that Microsoft’s Open XML was recently rejected by the ISO, which adopted OpenDocument Format as a standard earlier this year, IBM’s decision to stick with the open source crowd appears to be a solid one. Furthermore, IBM has also announced that it is going to release some of its Lotus code for use in OpenOffice.org’s productivity suite, allowing for an even more versatile OO.org in the not so distant future. It remains to be seen, of course, if anyone can topple Microsoft Office’s dominion in the world of office apps, but with IBM getting in the game and putting its Lotus muscle behind the OpenDocument Format and OpenOffice.org, the odds just got alot better.

(from OpenOffice.org, CNET, and IBM)

Bringing together activists from across a wide spectrum of left-leaning causes, the Free Software Foundation has launched an open letter to the world condemning Microsoft Vista as not only socially irresponsible, but environmentally dangerous. Yes, the FSF and its not-so-militant wing DefectiveByDesign.org recruited a host of environmental organizations including the Friends of the Earth International and the Green Party of the UK because, as the letter puts it:

“… the Green Party and Greenpeace issued warnings about the tremendous threat posed to the environment by the disposable computer mentality promoted in Microsoft’s $500-million Windows Vista marketing campaign. Vista’s steep hardware requirements mean that to use it, most people will have to throw their current computer into a landfill and buy a new one.”

Further, they argue that Microsoft’s DRM associated with Vista blocks your legal rights to make copies of your own media files and publicly available information. This, they suggest, is in direct opposition to the work of grassroots activists and environmental organizations that both depend on the free flow of information and are so often opposed to mechanisms of control like Vista.
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Earlier this month, the Linux community was saved from a major headache by as a federal court ruled that Novell, not SCO Group, owns the copyright to Unix. Which means that Novell can keep right on not suing anyone over the use of Unix or Linux and the open source community can keep doing its thing without fear of SCO suing them. Of course, there’s still that little matter of Microsoft’s claims to hold over Linux (last quote we heard the pulled out of thin air was 235 patents). But that is another legal fight for another day. Let’s just hope Microsoft doesn’t decide now is a good time to press any claims on those supposed patents. For now, rejoice Linux users, Novell is (for this month) thy savior.

(via PC World)

Universal Music has committed trying out DRM-free music sales through January 2008 at such disparate music stores as Amazon.com, RealNetworks, BestBuy.com, Passalong Networks, Google, and Wal-Mart’s online music service. Additionally, Universal will be selling DRM-free tracks on its individual artist and label sites. Notice a name missing from that list? Yep, Universal gave a metaphorical finger to Apple’s iTunes, claiming that they don’t want to be held back by Apple’s iPod-centric site.

This is spectacular news for those that have long advocated abandoning digital rights management and moving toward a more reasonable music market. However, Copyleft: the magazine is only cautiously optimistic, as the success of Universal’s experiment will depend on how well it does during the crucial holiday season (it’s no coincidence that Universal has only committed to its experiment until January). It’s too early to say for sure, but this could be the beginning of a major shift in how we get music to a freer, fairer system.

(via the New York Times and Universal Music)

Microsoft announced this week that Nokia has plans to integrate its PlayReady mobile DRM platform into some of its mobile phones. PlayReady is a newer DRM system that Microsoft launch back in February which is designed to be more flexible than previous systems (like PlaysForSure), but still give service provider control over how individual files are copied. The idea is that PlayReady will be platform and file-type independent, so will encumber music, video, image and program files regardless of whether they are transfered to a phone, PC or any other device. Users have to register their devices in a “domain”, which sets up a centralized security key that unlocks the file for use on acceptable (to the service provider) devices.

In many ways, this is a one step forward, two steps back type of proposal. Nokia and Microsoft will be giving consumers more flexibility in using their DRMed files than in the past, but are also setting up a system whereby the digital rights management software can worm its way into any convergent device. We’ll keep you posted as more people start picking up PlayReady and Nokia tells us exactly what it wants to do with the system.

(via Microsoft)

Alas, we aren’t talking about Digital Radio Mondiale, but the vaunted semi-public broadcasting service’s decision to adopt Microsoft’s Digital Rights Management on its new iPlayer Internet TV platform. Groups as far reaching as the Open Source Consortium, Binary Freedom Boston and Digital Copyright Canada (that’s far reaching globally) have been attacking the British Broadcasting Corporation’s decision to encumber the service for a while now, but with the service’s launch last week, tempers in the open source community have flared once again. This time, Defective By Design has called for protest in front of the BBC’s London headquarters on August 14, 2007. While some might claim that Defective by design just has grudge for any product with a lowercase “i” at the beginning of its name (iPod, iPhone, iMac, iPlayer, iFish), the group has some legitimate complaints.

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