Controlling Digital Content

Let's reflect for a moment, shall we?

What is the apparent goal for most all information? To be digitized, correct?

What is the push for music, film, gaming, entertainment content?

To be digitized.

The push is away from the physical, and towards the ethereal -- the realm of 1s and 0s.

As my brother Don wrote in a recent e-mail whilst we discussed the CD format, and HD-DVD vs BluRay formats:

I think you share my version of your statement, which is that until MILLIONS of others have wasted their dollars, I'm NOT going to be on the cutting edge of the high definition recorded media (now, apparently, the BLU-RAY), which is still one step short of the RIAA's and MS's great hope of getting the masses to NEVER, EVER actually own anything PHYSICAL, such as any sort of disc. In their ideal world, they want to have everything that is "yours" located on a server under THEIR CONTROL, where they can turn off the spigot and block your access any time they want. And if they ever achieve that, corporate greed will simply NOT be able to resist the temptation to cut you off for any one of a number of reasons, or at least degrade your access to the media that you have paid good money for.

He also included this article:

Microsoft Pulling Support for MSN Music DRM
By Eliot Van Buskirk
April 23, 2008 2:05:33 PM

Music fans who purchased music from Microsoft's MSN Music service are in for another cruel awakening about the harsh realities of digital rights management. As of September 1, it will become impossible to reauthorize songs purchased from the MSN Music store, which Microsoft shuttered to make way for Zune.

Music purchased from MSN Music will still play on authorized machines, but users only have five operating systems left in their entire lifetimes on which to play the music. I say "operating systems" instead of "computers" because even when a user upgrades, say from XP to Vista, songs need to be reauthorized.

What should you do if you want to keep your music? As Sony advised its users to do when it closed down Sony Connect, you can burn CDs of your purchased tracks and re-rip them. Of course, this degrades sound quality because it forces the music through the encoding process twice. MSN Entertainment and Video Services general manager Rob Bennett broke the bad news to former users of the MSN Music service in an email on Tuesday: "As of August 31, 2008, we will no longer be able to support the retrieval of license keys for the songs you purchased from MSN Music or the authorization of additional computers. You will need to obtain a license key for each of your songs downloaded from MSN Music on any new computer, and you must do so before August 31, 2008. If you attempt to transfer your songs to additional computers after August 31, 2008, those songs will not successfully play."

My brother also wrote:

Technical note from me: The weakest link in the creation of music on digital media is the encoding / decoding process, i.e., analog to digital, and digital to analog, which may include conversion from one sampling rate to another. Aside from that, if the music has to be crushed by any re-conversion via the MP3 "lossy" compression process, further degradation will occur.

In fact, MP3 is an inferior format than a CD. MP3s rely on a masking phenomenon, a reduction of the number of bits required to convey the same musical message. MP3 doesn't require as much bandwidth to convey a tune or to store it digitally. Proponents of the MP3 format believe that a statistically significant number of persons cannot tell the difference. The simpler the music, the more difficult it is to discern the difference -- most "popular" music today. However, the more complex the waveform in, for example, a 100-piece orchestra with a 250 voice choir, much will be lost.

My brother also makes an excellent series of points:

After chatting with a few other folks and reading some commentary on the net, I am led to believe that Vista's heavy handed Digital Rights Management is leaving a pretty foul taste in some folks mouths. Vista, on the other hand, is being accepted by quite a few folks who apparently don't intend to use a computer as the central component in a multi-media entertainment system. Some say that it doesn't affect the speed of their computer, but others claim that when they stripped Vista from their computer and loaded Windows XP, that the speed seemed to have doubled. Regardless of these claims, the overhead of constantly checking every peripheral (in real time) to constantly re-authorize them is a heavy burden.

I think the bottom line, however, is that corporate greed has scotched Bill Gates' dream of having the computer be the center component in a home theater. In short, when folks get burned, it ain't gonna happen. I heard somebody say that all it will take to finish off Bill Gates' dream is for the Chinese to come out with a $49 Blu-Ray/DVD/CD universal player and then nobody would put up with the nonsense that the RIAA and MS are foisting on us.

My prediction of a troubled future for DRM as presently applied by RIAA / MS is based on something as simple as this: IF a person cannot play back a Blu-Ray disc on his home theater that he bought only 4 years ago for anywhere from $5,000 to $40,000 without having to buy a NEW $10,000 PLASMA / PROJECTOR / DLP or any other expensive display, just because the signal to it must be ENCRYPTED, is a situation that I don't think will be generally tolerated. Those folks, like myself, will happily buy a Blu-Ray player, but that's as far as we're willing to go.

As a last thought, I can't help but think that the widespread "ripping" of CDs and DVDs and distribution of "free" music that came to occur as the result of an apparent feeling of entitlement; of being "due" this largesse, must be largely the cause of the industry's response in the form of DRM. In short, I think what has happened was largely initiated by the actions of that group that thought the musicians should give up their music for free. Unfortunately, corporate anger evolved into corporate greed and we have what we have. No single group is 100% without fault.

Here's the bottom line: if Sony Music thought the MP3 format was "sufficient," they wouldn't be archiving all their music (reminds me of the musical 'Master Tapes,' 2" tapes running at 30 inches per second) on hard drives, with the signals taking the form of uncompressed 24-bit, 192k-sampled audio. So evidently MP3 isn't The Ultimate? Imagine that!

My point being: whoever digitizes the content and controls this digitized content controls the almighty cash and the almighty licensing and playing.

Be forewarned, people.

BZ