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.”