This is why I don’t buy downloads of my music. Or if I do, I burn it to disc and rip it from the disc as an un-DRM’d mp3 file.
We reject the view that copyright owners and their licensees are required to provide consumers with perpetual access to creative works. No other product or service providers are held to such lofty standards. No one expects computers or other electronics devices to work properly in perpetuity, and there is no reason that any particular mode of distributing copyrighted works should be required to do so.
Steven Metalitz – Top legal advisor to MPAA and RIAA at The Copyright Office
They will do whatever they have to to make you repeatedly buy their product. Whether it is through changing format every decade or so, or as they are now working on, dropping a worm into the product that makes the product self destruct at a set time after registration.
Fuck him, I buy it – it’s MINE.
It’s that kind of attitude that’s making music piracy more acceptable.
Well then, that’s not BUYING music, that’s RENTING music.
If these corporate sharks are claiming to sell music, but actually are just renting it, they are liable for quite a number of torts, such as false advertising, mis-representation, conversion, just to name three.
They will also run afoul of lots of State laws which control all aspects of renting/leasing. They will, at least, have to offer a State-approved rental contract with every download or disc that has this worm in it.
Of course, deep thinking is beyond the RIAA, always has been. Ever since they quit their original job of being a standards committee for quality of recorded music and took up the subject of “intellectual property rights” (an oxymoron!), they have lost their entire ability to reason.
…and yes, DFWMTX, the actions of the RIAA beget the piracy we have now, and the pirates will ALWAYS be ahead of the RIAA. Every time they put a new “lock” on a digital recording, that lock is defeated within hours of the music containing it being published. If they were any good, they would have designed/fielded the un-rippable disc, but there ain’t no such animal.
You know, since most of the new music out there is just crap, you can save yourself a lot of effort and simply don’t buy it or steal it. You get no legal hassles, the record companies get no money and you win.
You want current music at cheaper prices?
Look for it offshore. I found a Russian company, allofmp3.com, that will let me download albums for between $1.50 and $3.00, depending on the artist. Google shows several other companies under a search “russian music downloads”, but I’ve only dealt with the one company.
All perfectly legal, the company has paid the royalties to the Russian Intellectual Property Licensing Bureau (they have a Bureau for everything there). The only iffy thing about the downloads was the fact that I had to deal with an offshore bank, but it was in Holland, so I gave it a shot, using a credit card that has a low limit and gets little use. There were no problems with the Dutch bank.
Now, I’ve heard rumors that the Russ Bureau in charge of collecting the royalties withheld some payments to artists and music monopolies, and was sued in the European Court, but since the Europeans have tighter control over intellectual property rights than anyone else, if the Russ skated in that court, I am still OK to possess that music.
The music pirates are all within OUR borders. Music is fairly-traded (more or less) elsewhere.
By that logic, my CD and DVD collection is apparently supposed to self-destruct at some random time in the future. I suppose they will eventually become unreadable, either due to limitations of the media itself, or because there will no longer be a device which can read them.
Funny, when I bought the CD’s and DVD’s, there was nothing in the contract or the copyright law as it existed (IIRC) which stipulated such a time limit. There were, however, stipulations that I could make backup copies for archival purposes. Again, absent some other factor, I could make a new copy from the original on a periodic basis and circumvent this unstated time limit.
I guess the RIAA and MPAA are expecting technological obsolescence to enforce this “new” limitation. Asshats.