Engadget points us to an interesting new site called SpiralFrog; an ad supported site that makes an attempt at free music, but it’s not really free. SpiralFrog makes a laughable attempt at offering free music, with catches. SpiralFrog music is all DRM’d. It requires you to log in at least once a month to maintain access to your account. If your account ever gets disabled, you will no longer able able to listen to your “free” music. It will not work on Mac or Linux nor will you be able to use it on your iPod. As a matter of fact, you cannot even sync your music to any more than 2 media players / cell phones at a time — assuming these said media players / phones support the DRM supplied (separate app — windows / CE based assumed ). And to top it all off, you will not be able to burn any music to CD.

What does their chairman this of this: “We believe it will be a powerful alternative to pirate sites” — Joe Mohen.

Talk about a complete misunderstand on why these “pirate sites” are so popular. It’s not just because the music is free, but it’s also because we can do anything we want with the songs. We can sync them to 1 or 500 media players. We do not have to maintain our account on these pirate sites in order to listen to our music. We can burn our music to CD and play it in our car, CD players, stereo systems, anywhere.

Maybe, just maybe, one of these centuries these music execs will understand this — well, we all can dream can’t we?

( Source: SpiralFrog’s “free” music download service goes live - Engadget )

So, did you hear? HBO’s latest proposal. Apparently, they figured out why consumers are not liking DRM; “it emphasized restrictions.” Never mind the fact that the whole premise behind DRM is limiting the options to use content, you have legally purchased, how you want.

Now HBO wants to call it “DCE” or “Digital Consumer Enablement.” You know, to make it sound like you’re getting more for your buck.  After all, if you can fool your customers into thinking they are being “enabled” additional content, it would catch on, no?

Anybody that has been on the web any more than a few days knows the more you attempt to suppress something, the more attention it gains, bringing us the Streisand Effect, name by TechDirt after a court case in which Barbara Streisand attempted to get photos of herself removed from sites only to increase their popularity.

This brings us to yesterday’s fiasco. AACS LA has attempted to all references of their decryption code from any site that just merely linked to it, including Google (pdf).

Now we have to think about this one. Thinking back to CSS, the decryption schema used by DVDs, you would think the market has learned their lesson. MPAA were the fore runners of the cease-and-desist letters, sending them to sites with any reference to CSS (Wikipedia: Universal v. Reimerdes). What happened? As you can guess, the news coverage of the lawsuit gained massive attention.

This brings us to AACS, the decryption schema used in HD-DVDs. You have to wonder, did AACS LA do their homework? If they did, they would know three things: 1) HD-DVD is falling in popularity due to PlayStation 3’s included Blu-Ray drive. 2) Doom9.org cracked the HD-DVD key several months ago. 3) Any attempts to sensor the internet has always resulted in gained popularity.

Three three factors combined into one makes you wonder something — was this an intentional act of the AACS LA to promote the HD-DVD format? Far fetched, I know, but anything is possible. Their lawyers cannot that stupid not know the consequences of their actions.

In a poor attempt to silence the masses (Boing Boing), the users of Digg and the internet fought back. It is pretty crazy. The mob took over; every single story on the front page of Digg, sans one, was about the algorithm for decrypting, copying and ripping HD-DVDs (in case you’ve missed it).

What is most interesting is the lengths gone: mooninite ASCII art with the code implanted; image colour bars (sans C0) made from the key; random posts; torrents; t-shirt; and even a domain of the key was registered (whois: com, net, org, info – and sure more).

I could sit here all day posting links to ever occurrence ever created, but instead I will leave that chore to Google and their permanent archive.

It is also worth noting that the encryption was broken back in February and remained fairly quiet until the AACS LA started sending out cease-and-desist letters (pdf) invoking the Streisand Effect — Oops…

Sony has done it again. While it’s not rootkits, it is definitely in the same ball park; they attempted to “update” their DRM schema. This go around was against DVDs which inadvertently made them incompatible with a number of DVD players. Sony attempted to push off the responsibility of updating onto the hardware manufactures, but finally relinquished and have agreed to replace any DVD of theirs which cannot play due to the DRM update.