This modern world - Digital Rights Management (DRM) and relationship breakdowns
The Times Online guest contributors Opinion The Times has a policy of only allowing web access to UK visitors so you'll excuse me if I copy the relevant text from today's paper here.

Chains of love

A NEIGHBOUR of mine has just split up with her long-term boyfriend, and faces a modern dilemma. She is emancipated, but her iPod is not.

Like women who never learnt to drive a generation before her, she had never learnt to manage her own digital music collection. This meant that her boyfriend had always loaded her iPod with his favourite tunes; her headphones became a kind of musical chastity belt.

What was worse is that she found out that since her iPod had initially been registered on his computer (which he took with him), it would not dock on to her new one. Apple had made her iPod faithful to the last, even when she had moved on.

Beware also a sorry tale I heard of a separating couple who were plunged into a messy custody battle for the computer. It was technically hers, but he was the one who had wasted weeks of his life laboriously loading his albums on to it.

Help was at hand for my neighbour. On the grapevine we found the services of a feminist IT expert who specialises in such cases. This is the e-mail she got in response to her first call for help: “Don’t worry, your iPod will soon be a free and independent young woman with a strong sense of self.”


Back in the old days of physical distribution of music, this was easy. He took all the Barry Manilow records and the battered "Never mind the boll*cks" album, she took all the Celine Dion. But in this modern world of downloadable music and DRM it's all rather harder. It's his computer and he does all the downloading, ripping and sorting but it's her iPod and she chose and listens to the music. So who owns it? But much more importantly who gets to keep it? Again, back in the old days, when a parent died and left you all their Opera you could just box it up and put it in the attic until you were old enough to appreciate it. But now and in the future, you'll have a hard time listening to it. So can you leave your 60Gb of music to your heirs?

Unless we turn round and say NO loudly, this is only going to get worse. It's now becoming apparent that Apple and Intel in future versions of the Mac are going to embed "Trusted Computing" in the processor and deep in the operating system. You can bet that this will be used to control access and use of the DVD drive, iTunes and probably the screen. Meanwhile, Microsoft is working on PVP-OPM (Protected Video Path – Output Protection Management) and again with Intel's help trying to lock down the general purpose PC so that only approved content can be shown on approved hardware all the way out to the screen.

So what we have here is one cartel (Intel-Microsoft-Apple) aiding and abetting another cartel (The Media-Entertainment industries) to build systems and lobby for laws originating in the USA, but spreading thoughout the western world via secretive organisations like WIPO, to reduce your customer rights, to produce hobbled systems and all to prop up existing business models that no longer make sense. This is a monopolistic, mercantilist, plutocrat political system at it's most abhorrent, protecting itself by whatever means necessary and even going so far as to demanding money with menaces by suing it's own customers.

Apart from "Just Say No To DRM" and trying to influence the market by refusing to buy their products, what can you do? Well the EFF tries to track and limit the damage in the USA, but there's precious little in Europe. So perhaps you'd like to sign this pledge. "I will create a standing order of 5 pounds per month to support an organisation that will campaign for digital rights in the UK but only if 1000 other people will too." We desperately need some counter balance to the current protectionist system. [from: JB Ecademy]

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[ 01-Aug-05 1:25pm ]