Customers loathe and despise DRM. What’s a marketer to do? Advertise products as “DRM-free” when they’re nothing of the sort! After Sony and Nokia comes MySpace. Their “DRM-free” service involves music that can only be played over the Internet while you’re sitting at the computer on their web page having your eyes gouged out by the tasteful graphic design they’re famous for. I look forward to their explanations to Trading Standards if they try selling this one in the UK. I also look forward to the MySpace equivalent of these.

*ahem* I told you so.

DAS BUNKER, British Phonographic Industry, Wednesday (NNGadget) — Sony-Ericsson has announced PlayNow Plus, a new plan for unlimited “DRM-free” music downloads on phones.

“Pay, er, PlayNow Plus is completely unlimited, covers all major labels, no DRM, get all you want any time you like,” said spokesdroid Mobile Salestwat. “This is the biggest deal in mobile music ever! Of course, it’ll only play on your phone, for the duration of the contract, all songs then disappearing. Well, just a little DRM. Honest.”

(more at the other site)

The content industry is addicted to control. We tell them over and over again that DRM is mathematically impossible. There is no such thing as a trusted client: you can’t give the customer the lock and the key to the lock and simultaneously keep it secret from them. There is no DRM that hasn’t been broken or bypassed unless it has so few customers that no-one cared to.

And the customers despise it: Macrovision, DVD regions, non-CDs, iTunes, HDMI, hifi systems that won’t let you use the digital SACD or DVD-A output. They got screwed over by Liquid Audio, then Microsoft PlaysForSure, then Yahoo Music shutting down. And Apple is getting distinctly weird lately.

But the industry lust for control is so overwhelming that, burnt and burnt again, they’ll keep trying. Offer stupid amounts of money for a physical impossibility and someone will claim to be able to do it for you. Ladeez gemmun, I give you the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem. Formerly known as Open Content, this one will work for sure. (Even if the press embargo failed.) This time. No unpaid copies or downloads ever again. You betcha.

(No Nokia, Samsung or LG in this everyone-but-Apple list. No movies on mobiles? Epic fail.)

Rick Astley takes us through his finest Rickrolls. I had someone Rickroll me by phone a couple of months ago.

Oasis are giving away three songs from their forthcoming album, Meet The Beatles. Not as downloads — as sheet music. With Arts Council funding, no less.

Music is too fragmented for anti-DRM campaigns to do much. Games are much more hit-oriented. So Spore is having the crap beaten out of it on Amazon over DRM. Online activation required, after three activations you phone EA and wait on hold. That’s only if you actually pay for it rather than downloading a cracked copy. Piracy: The Better Choice™.

(Or the other way around!)

Keith Cameron wrote earlier this year in the Grauniad of all places about the re-release after twenty years of “My Pal” a much loved Australian indie single by God whose members went on to work with Spencer P. Jones and Bored and form Hoss and Powder Monkeys.

I know that the original single got a fair bit of air play on campus radio in the USA, but didn’t know it was known in the UK, unless John Peel played it!

[Update] I’ve just been advised that John Peel played “My Pal” on his show in 1988 and it was taped by a friend that still remembers it, thanks Marge!

It’s not a $500 ethernet cable, but you’d better be in serious need of serious silence to drop $2500 on a door. Mind you, it weighs about 110kg. (And is cheap compared to other acoustic doors.) I want a wall of them for my deaf old neighbour who likes watching his pr0n at 2am on Saturday evenings.

“That’s how things are done these days,” says drummer Lars Ulrich. “Also, there’s the novelty of anyone wanting to listen to a Metallica album.”

The ridiculously widely publicised default judgement against a filesharer has attracted the sort of attention they’d probably rather it hadn’t. Michael Coyle of Lawdit Solicitors has offered to defend fileshares targeted by Davenport Lyons pro bono.

Of course, it’ll probably help if you’re not a dickhead.

(KaZaA is so 2001, darling.)

From the same company that brought you the Black Velvet Wesley Crusher.

I got sick enough of this with Squishdot. MySQL just ate itself all by itself and had to be restored from backups. Fortunately, I recovered both the last two posts from the LiveJournal feed. Next: taking a daily backup myself. At least I’m not actually paying for this hosting …

In a response to Rolling Stone’s review of the reissue of U2’s early album Boy, Bono likens The Edge to Van Gogh and recording the album to the protagonist’s growing up in The Tin Drum.

Thanks to Joel Silbersher for the heads up.

Davenport Lyons, “a leading London law firm,” has put out a press release, which has been run as-is by large chunks of the press, speaking of the Patents County Court in London having ruled that the unnamed woman “should pay Topware Interactive, owner of the computer game Dream Pinball 3D, damages of £6,086.56 plus costs and disbursements of £10,000.”

The only problem is that no trace of the case’s existence can be found. Several posters to the Open Rights Group mailing list have failed to find any mention of such a case in court lists. Neil Dunbar of the list notes that the Patents County Court Diary will publish all cases as of October 2007. The Patent Courts Diary (PDF) “has no listing for this trial, although it does reference other trials for 22 July, when DL claim the judgment was handed down.”

A mysterious missing judgement, and a press release reprinted without the faintest nod to fact-checking? It’s August.

Update: Actual journalism found in the Daily Mail! (Warning: Daily Mail.) It appears to be a default judgement against an unemployed single mother, Isabella Barwinska, who didn’t show up to court (despite BBC report to the contrary). Lotsa luck collecting.

The zombie technology of the magazine suffers the final insult: Mygazines.com, a magazine-sharing site. The hard part in nailing them for this blatant copyright violation is that they’re trying the corporate ownership passed around by p2p trick. As it happens, the magazines are uploaded with all original advertisements, so what the publishers would need is auditable views on the site that their advertisers would believe. I really should get the old Party Fears up.

Radiohead’s In Rainbows did zillions of copies through bittorrents and filesharing, suggesting they’re replacing the radio, not the CD. Not that the death of the CD is a worry for musicians; ask Lyle Lovett, who’s “never seen a dime” from 4.6 million album sales in two decades.

Amy Winehouse should be so lucky to survive, and thrive, as Marianne Faithfull has done.

One of my other pastimes is Wikipedia. We’re all about the free-as-in-freedom content — not just no-cost with-permission, but wide-open to reuse, including commercially. This concept makes culture industry people’s heads explode, but we did make #8 website in the world that way.

The hard part is photos of entertainers. Bad live shots, fan snapshots and so forth under a proper free content licence always supersede something that isn’t free content. (Looking pretty isn’t the mission — reusable and remixable content is. So we’re hardarses about it.)

I’m wondering a useful way to reliably get entertainment industry promo photos to flock to us. The third-best shot of the shoot, say. I suspect the worst fan snaps would be an incentive. So where and how do we publicise this? (I’ve asked this before.)

(If you’ve taken decent photos of someone with a Wikipedia article but no good pic, we’d love ‘em. I’m slowly going through my own twenty years’ photos. CC by-sa is fine, and requires your name staying attached to the image details page. Follow in the steps of Joichi Ito.)

I stopped by the Wayback Machine yesterday and found a pile of classic Rocknerd. This is slowly being hand-restored. (Mostly my own stuff first.) 2001, 2002, 2003! Comments not restored yet (if ever).

Sorry, EMI — fair use is possible in sound recordings. Even for duplicitous creationist nutters no sane person would want to be associated with. This may have just blown the bottom out of sample licensing.

Cliff Harris from small game company Positech asked why people pirate his games. In what could be a shining example to anyone in music with a clue, he’s acted on the results — no DRM, better demos, lower price, slicker content. And no DRM. Also, no DRM. Who’da thunk?

Hard disks are cheap; cultural preservation is forever.

(Mind you, I still so so so want one of these.)

Bonus: The earliest known sound recording — 1860, seventeen years before Edison.

When Uwe Boll* calls [*may not be 100% true], Richard O’Brien listens. (Or not.) ‘Cos adaptations make the world go round.

(1944 Marxist sociology is often indistinguishable from rock journalism. Or how-tos.)

The drink of audiophiles. The only thing I can see wrong is it’s far too cheap. (Spotted by Wechsler.)

(Bonus link: a magnetic thing that actually does something useful.)

Exact Audio Copy is the Chuck Norris of CD rippers. It turned a rotted old demo CD-R by the Deadites (from back when CD-Rs were blue) that wouldn’t even play as an audio CD into playable music in just seven hours. I think one second of the original 17-minute EP went astray. And the DVD drive didn’t melt. Linux and Macintosh users will be pleased to know that EAC works flawlessly in Wine, and of course the Linux users can still alternate with cdparanoia.

(My current yak shaving is reripping all my CDs as FLAC. Disk is so cheap.)

I can’t wait for peer-to-peer drug networks. Those headphone audiophools were onto something. If only Anthony Burgess had thought of “personal stereos.”

(spotted by Jed)

Obituary of the year.

It’s scientifically proven: keeping everything in copyright forever leads to a tragedy of the anticommons. (Despite Cliff Richard’s pleas on behalf of continuing royalties for session musicians … er, hold on.)

The general public just refuse to see copying as morally wrong if it’s not for money. But attribution is another matter. (Look at the drama when someone STEALS a LiveJournal icon from the original thief.)