Despite the sign we posted on Friday, Circuit City says they are not offering a copyright-breaking DVD to iPod service.
drm
Circuit City Flouts The DMCA For A Tenner
By 8.4.06
Well, well, well! Look who’s violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act! For only a couple of fins, Circuit City will take your DVD and an iPod and flagrantly breach copyright at your behest.
Singing Eyeballs Encourage Fans To Burn Their Own CDs
By 6.27.06
Leave it to a singing negro skull and three gelatinous, bloodshot eyeballs dressed in tuxedos to finally put the absurdity of DRM in perspective: my favorite band, the Residents, are selling a double album on their website for $14.99 that contains nothing but two blank CDs. Over the next 40 weeks, those who have bought the blank CDs will then download the album in pieces over iTunes and assemble the album themselves when it’s all over.
Call An RIAA Slug on Friday!
By 6.21.06
Our friends at Defective Design aren’t just cramming their pallid flesh into hazmat suits and getting into stand-offs with bemused Cambridge cops in their fight against DRM. Now they are organizing a massive telephone campaign, coordinating on their site an effort to have as many consumers as they can call up the RIAA and tell them that DRM just plain blows. Although hopefully a hell of a lot more eloquently than that.
HazMat Protesters Drop Mad Science
By 6.21.06
Here’s another version of the DRM protest involving hazmat suits and the San Fran Apple store. It’s got less Talking Heads, more people speaking about (or, heads talking…) about why DRM is bad. If you don’t know why it is, watch. If you do and would like to have your beliefs affirmed, watch. If you like sweaty geeks, watch. All we know is DRM prevented us from easily transmogrifying our sister into the next Grandmaster Flash, so now we’re totally mad against it, even more than we were madly before.
iTunes Makes Weird Al Broke
By 6.20.06
If Chinese sweatshops or locking yourself into an anti-competitive DRM format aren’t enough reasons to stop you from buying songs from iTunes, at least take pity on polka’s favorite rockin’ freak: Weird Al Yankovic says he makes a lot less money if you buy a song from iTunes than if you buy one of his CDs.
Sweaty Anti-iTunes Hazmat Geek Speaks!
By 6.13.06
e nerds who stormed the nation’s Apple Stores last Friday, wrote us in response to our recent post, calling our attention to a write-up he did of Defective Design’s protest at Boston’s Cambridge Side Galleria. The fuzz seemed pretty cool with the whole thing:
Anti-iTunes DRM Demonstration Brings Out The Haz Mat Nerds
By 6.12.06
We somehow missed news of this, but there was a nationwide protest at various Apple Stores on Friday, trying to educate people about the dangers of DRM. The primary danger being, of course, the fact that it’s bad for consumers because it locks you in to a single competitor… if you put your head in the microwave and then decide to switch from an iPod to a Creative Zen, you need to repurchase all your iTunes songs. Ironically enough, this protest was held the same day I decided to give my aged mother my old Dell DJ and invest in an iPod myself. Unfortunately, I went to Best Buy, so I didn’t run into any of the guys at the Boston Apple store; otherwise, we might have had some of that first-hand content Ben’s always telling me I should be trying to find.
In Soviet Russia, AllofMp3.com Is Legal!
By 6.8.06
AllofMp3.com is one of those brilliant sites that I perpetually feel guilty for using, since it really is just too great a value to be legal. Nevertheless, it’s hard to resist buying music by the digital equivalent of the kilo: 99 cents per song feels like a reaming after paying a penny per meg.
Sony Rootkit Settlement Reached, Approved
By 6.6.06
Somehow this escaped our attention, but on May 23, the judge approved the settlement on the Sony rootkit debacle, you remember, the one where they installed crippling programs on your computer to prevent you from copying their precious cds?
You Don’t Own Anything With DRM
By 5.15.06
One problem with DRM in general is that it is an industry concept that takes-as-read the consumerist fallacy that you don’t actually own things you buy, you just license them. Perhaps this is the natural evolution of consumerism now that products like media are, if not less tangible, at least a bit more ethereal. Still, DRM gives all the power to the companies… and companies prove time and time again that they can’t be trusted.
Canada Flees The CRIA
By 4.19.06
We wish this analogy worked better: “Like a loathsome foreign body forcibly ejected from its host…” Then we’d follow the aposiopesis with the news that six Canadian music corporations have left the CRIA largely due to its policies towards copyright and DRM. Unfortunately, CRIA stands for “Canadian Recording Industry Association,” so when six of Canada’s largest record companies forcibly eject from the body, it only leaves the virus in control of the host.
See You in the Funnies, MPAA/RIAA
By 4.19.06
Hi-larious webcomic skewering the DRM Nazis’ ‘business model.’
Bush’s iPod Houses “Illegal” Songs
By 4.17.06
The RIAA and the DRM Nazis could have a new target besides small families, single mothers and MIT students. How about the President of the United States? From BoingBoing:
