Tag: DRM

Less than two weeks after Harper Collins incited a firestorm with news of its e-book library circulation cap, the American Library Association has thrown its hat into the ring. This week, one of the group's recently-convened electronic book task forces met in D.C. to draw up recommendations for an ALA response to stingy publishers' licenses. Among the recommendations suggested by the ...

It's only been a day, and hackers have already figured out a way around the Apple App Store's DRM, opening the door for pirated apps. The trick is simple enough, and doesn't actually break Apple's DRM; it simply bypasses it. Some apps check for a receipt file that then authorizes the program to run. The problem is that many simply check if the receipt exists, and not if the receipt is ...

Ever wonder why the Netflix app (available for both the iPhone and iPad) isn't available for Android users? According to Netflix, it's because the Android platform isn't secure enough for Hollywood execs. The fundamental hurdle seems to be the app's Digital Rights Management (DRM) system, and the fact that Netflix hasn't been able to standardize it across all Android devices. This lack of ...

Other than the frenzied anticipation for the coming breed of tablet PCs, the one topic that dominates the mindspace of the technorati these days is the world of e-readers. More specifically, a great debate is brewing; each of the e-readers and their associated online book stores favor differing standards and file formats, and we may have another good ole fashioned format war on our hands. ...

Share Warner Bros. is notorious for its attempts to squash piracy, which have included suing popular music search sites and hiring interns whose sole purpose is to find pirated content and issue takedown notices. The company also began embedding each film distributed to theaters and critics with a unique identifier, so that Warner could trace leaked and pirated movies back to their source. But, ...

Turning yourself into the police is never all that fun. Unless, that is, you're on a crusade to catch the government in a sticky web of legal contradiction. A martyr man in Denmark is on such a holy mission to prove a point about the Danish government's legislation on anti-piracy. After unsuccessfully lobbying an anti-piracy group for a trial, Henrik Anderson has now taken the plunge and gone ...

When Amazon.com went into Kindle devices across the country to delete unauthorized copies of 'Animal Farm' and '1984' by George Orwell, the irony was certainly not lost on users. A Big Brother move, no doubt, especially because no one was informed of the invasion of privacy -- and customers thought the reclaimed content had been legally purchased. Amazon did issue refunds, but the blogosphere ...

The Internet made pirating music as simple as clicking a few buttons in a program, much to the dismay of record companies around the world. Those same companies tried to control the music through the use of Digital Rights Management (DRM), but failed miserably. Only now are the record companies realizing that a large majority of people only pirate music because it's simply the easiest and most ...

The Kindle should be a pretty straight forward proposition, but this just goes to show you how sometimes folks can stir up controversy even with something as innocuous as an e-book reader. First there was the hassle with the Writers Guild over text-to-speech, and then Amazon threatened MobileRead with legal action for merely linking to software they didn't take kindly too. And now we're hearing ...

var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/apple/iTunes_top_tracks_1_29_Amazon_0_99_thanks_record_labels'; As promised, variable pricing has now been implemented at the iTunes music store. Already, we're seeing most of top 10 singles and 33 of the top 100 hitting the top price-point of $1.29 (encoded as DRM-free 256kbps AAC). Interesting as Amazon's uncomfortably similar top 10 list has all these ...

This morning, the National Consumers League released a statement claiming that 90-percent of PC-owning, U.S. consumers want the ability to save DVDs, as they would CDs, on their computers. The study was conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation, and drawn from a survey of 1,000 consumers of varying ages. This should come as no surprise to those who have witnessed the gradual digitalization ...

Back in September, we said it was only a matter of time before the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) went after RealDVD, the software that lets you copy entire DVDs onto your computer for personal use. Studios are currently involved in a heated lawsuit with RealNetworks in Federal court that aims to ban the sale of the product. The MPAA claims that the software violates the Digital ...

Yesterday, Neil Young fired a shot at YouTube, claiming that the Google-owned purveyor of online video has unfairly treated artists signed to the Warner Music Group. According to Young's blog (cleverly titled 'NY Times'), YouTube has underpaid Warner artists, whose peers on other record labels have been getting larger licensing checks. Young points out that, because Warner Reprise was one of the ...

We can't count the number of times we've heard from one random source or another that Apple was about to pull the trigger on a subscription-based / 100-percent DRM-free music service, and given how those have worked out in the past, we'd highly recommend taking this one with a huge dose of salt. French site ElectronLibre has it that Apple will finally offer up all of its music in DRM-free form ...

Walmart began selling DRM-free tracks in its music store in August of last year. 13 months later, the mega-corp has decided to follow the footsteps of so many others and hit the kill switch on its DRM management servers. As noted in an e-mail to customers, Wally World will be making the final transition into a fully DRM-free MP3 store on October 9th, and in order to keep those DRM-laden files ...