Category: DRM

  • Screwed over by DRM AGAIN!

    Screwed over by DRM AGAIN!

    I will not be having a Star Wars day today on May the Fourth and it’s thanks to Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). For people who wonder why I often blog about DRM – this is why we need to fight it. I bought LEGO Star Wars five or more years ago. It was OK, but…

  • If you’re non-technical or my Anti-DRM rants never make sense, you need to watch this video

  • We need to be the masters of our computers

    The most important paragraph in Corey Doctorow’s essay: No, the worst part is that, like the lady who had to swallow the bird to catch the spider that she’d swallowed to catch the fly, any technical system that stops you from being the master of your computer must be accompanied by laws that criminalize information…

  • This is when Civil Disobedience is Needed

    Librarian of Congress: Don’t be a bigot! Renew the rights of the blind to read!

  • I know I’m late to the game on this, but hurrah to JK Rowling for making the Harry Potter ebooks DRM-free! Just because of that, I’ll be sure to buy it this summer! Before I was scared about DRM-issues. I’ve been burned before – I have a bunch of Microsoft LIT books that I legally…

  • Giving them a taste of their own medicine

    It is a fact of life that things will be bootlegged. (commonly called pirated, but this is one area where I strongly agree with rms. Piracy is a horrible thing where people get kidnapped on the ocean and die. I have in-law relatives who have died from pirates. So I don’t find it cute to…

  • An Open Plea for Sanity to Amazon and Valve

    Dear Amazon and Valve, I write this to you because you are the largest and most powerful companies in your ecosystems.  The digital world has become ridiculous and you need to be leaders in rectifying the situation.  Let’s start with Amazon.  The two biggest digital things you sell are books and music.  Back in the…

  • Rethinking Ebooks

    Until now I’ve been quite against ebooks. Back when I was in college I had an iPaq and I downloaded the Microsoft reader to it. I bought about 3 – 5 books for it and, at first, I thought it was great. It would allow you to annotate the book and highlight passages. And it…

  • Another Reason Why People Illicitly Download TV Shows

    My father-in-law is over today and he’s been dying to watch the Bizarre Foods Paris episode.  I’m opposed to buying video media off of iTunes because of the digital restrictions management (DRM).  But, he’s been wanting to watch that episode forever and we no longer have cable so I can’t record it onto MythTV.  We…

  • Microsoft DRM Metldown Redux

    As I mentioned here, Micro$oft has provided yet another example of why digital restrictions management does nothing but hurt legitimate consumers.  To remind you, this is when Microsoft turned off the servers for its ironically named “playsforsure” DRM system.  These songs, which consumers would told, would play for sure on any digital media player containing…

  • Another example of DRM being hurtful

    The Free Software Foundation’s Defective by Design is reporting that MSN Music is shutting down, leaving anyone who bought music legally left with music they can no longer listen to.  This will have two outcomes and neither of which is what the music labels really want.  Some people will decide they got left holding the…

  • iPod Shuffle

    For years I had been saying that I would not buy an iPod product.  After all, they sell music in the iTunes music store with DRM on it.  All of my music on my Linux computer is in the OGG format and it can’t be played with iPods.  However, when it came time to buy…

  • Charitable Donations for 2008

    This year I decided to mainly support technological causes.  I donated to the Free Software Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  I think that rms and the rest over at the FSF are really doing a lot of great work to preserve our freedoms.  I especially like the Defective by Design campaign they’ve been running. …

  • Another example of the perils of DRM

    Time and again I’ve warned my readers of the perils of DRM.  (Specifically here and here).  That’s why I don’t buy music on iTunes and have given all of my digital music patronage to Amazon.com.  Even my wife, who’s not as into FOSS and all that as I am, has become disgusted as she’s understood…

  • HEY RIAA, all you needed to do was offer DRM-free music!

    I’ve already spent around $11 on Amazon.com’s MP3 download store. Why? Because they are selling MP3s of my favorite artists without any digital restrictions management (DRM). This is what has been keeping both my wife and I away from iTunes. Oh yeah, and the songs are cheaper than iTunes! It appears that all of the…