An article on News.com today discusses how most pay-to-play (and many free) content services don’t support Macintosh. As is the case with many of News.com’s articles about digital media, the reporters are a little too lazy or uninformed to follow up on some of the most interesting bits.

For example, the story quotes Movielink CEO James Ramo as saying that Movielink doesn’t support Macintosh because they haven’t found a DRM that works on the platform. But (as noted in the article) RealNetworks offers RealOne SuperPass for Mac OS X, which means that RealNetworks’ Macintosh player does include the RealSystem DRM. So why is James blaming RealNetworks for their lack of Mac support? And does RealNetworks care that their most visible customer is blaming them for their lack of execution? Its inexcusible that the reporters didn’t make the connection and follow up.

Also, the reporters quote Apple VP Phil Schiller as saying that Apple hasn’t moved on DRM because of customer experience issues. But later in the article the writers claim that Apple “has shied away from DRM for technical reasons”. The reporters should’ve seen and followed up on the contradiction.

Finally, the reporters claim that MPEG-4 has “a DRM-shaped hole”. It’s not clear whether they made this up or whether this is something Apple told them, but they make it sound as if Phil told them this. The reality is that MPEG-4′s IPMP means that MPEG-4 vendors are responsible for filling in their own DRM-shaped holes. Everyone technology reporter knows that the chance to ask Apple about their hole only comes along once in a great while… | News.com article

The methods used to make “Not-CDs” (which purposefully violate the Red Book audio CD standard in an effort to prevent copying) are incredibly trivial and easily defeated, according to an article in New Scientist. So trival and easily defeated, in fact, that it almost makes you feel sorry for the record labels that are paying to license the “technologies” (if you can call data corruption a technology).

Wow. The record labels sure are suckers, aren’t they? It’s amazing, the desperation we’re seeing as they try to protect prices that are way out of line compared to, say, DVDs.

As an example, for twice the price of a very plain CD you can get a four-DVD version of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, with 208 minutes of movie and hours upon hours of commentaries and extras in positively luxurious packaging. And the record industry wonders what the problem is? If CDs cost what they should cost — $7.99 is a good place to start — there wouldn’t be a problem.

The 2002 ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management is being held on 18 Nov 2002 in Washington DC as part of their ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security.

It would be fascinating to go, but even if you can’t, you can download papers that will be presented at the conference. They all look intriguing, and they’re all on my reading list.

BMG is apparently moving to use copy protection on all of their CDs. You’d think that they’d have learned after effectively killing Natalie Imbruglia’s career by using Cactus Data Shield on her last (and probably last, nudge nudge wink wink) CD, but apparently more artists must be sacrificed.

According to a BMG unit in Kopierschutz, Germany, “There will be no cd manufactured without copyprotection any more.” This was in response to a customer who asked how they could get a CD, rather than the CD-looking thing they’d inadvertantly purchased that wouldn’t play in their CD player. It turns out that the U.S. version of the album in question won’t be protected. But…

This is a classic case of backwards marketing — doing something that (you think) benefits you, rather than doing things that (at a profit) benefit your customers — and BMG will pay for it. I will personally avoid purchasing BMG discs if at all possible, and if it’s an album I really want, will wait until a cracked version is also available.

So if the artists lose, and the labels lose, who wins? Macrovision, who is aquiring the the Cactus Data Shield and SafeAudio “technologies” (which are really just methods of creating CDs outside of the official specification, after all). It will be interesting to see how record labels react to Macrovision fiddling while Rome burns. Link

Dan is a great journalist that covers technology for the San Jose Mercury News. He recently answered some questions sent by Slashdot readers. Here’s what he had to say about copyright:

He also elaborates on previous comments he’s made about Apple’s DRM strategy:

Apple can’t afford to have an anti-DRM strategy, but my question is simply whether they can afford to not have a DRM strategy at all. Presumably Apple will adopt IPMP (“iPimp”?), but IPMP just specifies an interface to DRM technologies rather than the technologies themselves. Link

In a survey recently released by GartnerG2, 77% of respondents said that they should be able to copy CDs for personal use in another device, 60% said they should be able to give copies of CDs to members of their families, and 82% said that they should be able to copy CDs for personal backup purposes.

And why shouldn’t they? I’ll certainly be doing all of these things, whether or not the RIAA says I can.

74% of respondents also said that these AC/CDs — they’re not CDs, so I’m going with “Anti-Copy Compact Disc” for now — should have giant orange warning labels, presumably so that they can avoid them. Link