Re: Amazon MP3 Store is pretty damn good, but of course there's _always_ a catch :-(

On 2007-09-28, Davoud <star@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Davoud:
What on earth does your raving accomplish??? You don't want to
use the Amazon software, don't use it. It isn't "special"
software -- it's just software. While you were raving I was
buying two albums from Amazon. Great sounding jazz, cheap and
quick. What's the problem?

Mark Shroyer:
The problem is that you have to use their software to purchase
full albums from the site. This is pointless and is only going
to end up hurting Linux and BSD users.

Sorry, but statistically, in Amazon's target audience, there
aren't any Linux and BSD users.

Well let's be fair, according to W3Counter there are only about
twice as many Macintosh users out there as there are Linux desktop
users. We're _all_ insignificant next to Windows users. That's
what gives us our alluring mystique. (I can't speak for the
methodology of their latest study, but I've seen similar figures
elsewhere so I assume it's reasonably accurate.)

The rationale for the parent poster's complaint, and I totally
agree, is that Amazon is mere inches away from having the
perfect, non-DRM, cross platform MP3 store; it's frustrating to
watch them throw away that dream

Your dream, not Amazon's. Their dream is to sell lots of MP3's
and, given Amazon's track record, that dream will most likely come
true.

No arguments there. They're going to make a killing with this
thing.

because they, for whatever reason, felt the need to shoehorn
their users into relying on an unnecessary download application
for album purchases.

The reason has become clear. iTunes integration. Album art. I like
it. I buy DRM-free music from other stores, including
magnatune.com. I have to manually put the songs in iTunes, and
there's no album art. Oy, the pain!

Yeah, the Downloader is kind of cool on the platforms that it
supports, although I haven't yet gotten its automatic iTunes import
feature to work on OS X. To be clear, I'm not saying they should
throw the MP3 Downloader out completely, just that they should make
it optional for the sake of users who cannot or don't want to use
it. Everybody wins, right?

For the DRM paranoids: I agree that DRM is silly. The industry
needs to find a new way to do business. But DRM has always been
absolutely transparent to me; it has never prevented me from
listening to my music the way I want to.

I'm happy for your good fortune, but not all of us have been so
lucky. And it only takes a little imagination to see how a
slight shift in circumstances could cause DRM to get in your way,
too. What will you do with all your iTunes purchases if Company
X releases some heretofore unimagined uber MP3 player next year
that you're totally dying for but, oops, it doesn't support
FairPlay? What about thirty years from now when you fire up that
turn of the century Macintosh sitting in your attic to listen to
your old albums, but you can't play the stuff you bought from
iTunes because the iTunes Music Store is a distant memory and all
the authorization servers have long been shut down?

You don't notice that you had to reach for extremes to illustrate
your point? In what way have you been unlucky, i.e., how has
Apple's DRM prevented you from listening to your iTMS music as you
want? You can't count the iTunes/iPod restriction because you
voluntarily entered into a contract with Apple in which you agreed
to that. It's not as if iTunes/iTMS/iPod are the /only/ way of
buying and listening to music.

These examples aren't extremes, they're both scenarios which I fully
expect to anticipate in my life. Someday, probably not too long
from now, someone *will* create an MP3 player that I like better
than my iPod. Thirty years from now, I *will* want to dig my old
iBook out of the attic and see what kinds of music and other
artifacts of my earlier life are lying dormant on that puny 120 GB
hard drive.

DRM hasn't affected me at all precisely because I refuse to purchase
DRM laden music. It has affected a close friend of mine who,
intelligent and worldly though she may be, just wasn't technically
adept enough to fully grasp the concept of DRM before she had
already wasted a fair sum of money in the iTunes Music Store on
songs she was obviously unable to use on her Creative player. (I
don't fault Apple that she didn't read the fine print, but it is a
rather silly restriction to begin with. Who, fresh into the world
of online music stores, and with a naïve ignorance of the awful
hubris these record and software companies so unabashedly display
like gorillas beating their chests, would suspect that Apple might
deliberately sabotage her music purchases to prevent them from
working on a competing MP3 player?)

Saying that buying an iPod is somehow equivalent to entering into a
contract with Apple is a cop-out (not to mention just plain
bizarre). Not being able to play your iTunes-purchased music on
anything but an Apple MP3 player isn't some special case, it's
precisely the sort of anti-consumer nonsense that makes some of us
avoid DRM like the plague.

There will almost certainly be a new über MP3 player in the
future, but it will be an iPod.

Dogma is fun, but I live in the real world. I've had three iPods
over the years and I've loved each one of them, but sadly I'm not
clairvoyant enough to be able to say, with utmost certainty, that
never never ever in the history of the world will anything come
along to top the iPod. So I like to keep my options open.

The olde "how will you play them when you're 93" cliché. I wonder
if my great-grandpa thought of that in 1902 when he bought his
Edison Cylinder Phonograph.

I just bought a /new/ replacement stylus for it and it's still
playing those cylinders. No one knows what the world will be like
30 years from now; barring catastrophe, there is no reason to
think that the songs I bought from Apple will be unusable 30 years
from now. I am more concerned about my ability to /hear/ them at
age 93.

That's actually an excellent example. The old phonographs and
phonograph cylinders were simple, robust, self-contained machines.
It doesn't matter whether you're using one in 1903 or in 2103, it'll
work just the same.

The phonograph as a popular music playback device owes much of its
robustness to the fact that it is defined, in essence, by
specification and not by implementation. That is to say, as with
CDs and cassette tapes and other physical media, there is a common
understanding of what a phonograph _is_, how it stores audio and in
what fashion that audio should be reproduced during playback.
There's no single reference implementation, you don't need an Edison
brand phonograph to play an Edison brand record. So even if you
were to accidentally break your great grandfather's phonograph, you
can feel secure in the knowledge that you can buy -- or, with enough
dedication and an adequate knowledge of machinery, build -- another
one to replace it and get those old cylinders playing once more.

The MP3 and AAC audio codecs are like these old physical media, in a
way. The underlying technology may be of a completely different
nature, but these codecs are really just standard ways of
mathematically transforming an audio signal into an efficient binary
representation, and vice versa. There's no "official" MP3 or AAC
encoder or decoder that you need for using these types of files, any
more than there is an official CD player or cassette deck. Anyone
can follow the standard and create his or her own.

Thus, I have a very good reason to believe that for as long as I
feel the urge to hang onto my DRM-free MP3 purchases, I'll have no
trouble playing them on whatever kind of MP3 player or personal
computer I might have years from now: Because if there isn't already
an AAC and MP3 player packaged with my shiny new Laptop 2027, then
with enough dedication and an adequate knowledge of software
engineering, I or others like me can, and -- MP3, at least, is
historically significant enough to say so with near certainty --
will, create one based on these open standards.

Contrast this with DRM such as FairPlay. DRM schemes, by their very
nature, cannot be defined by specification; if "outsiders" (read:
those who are to be denied full control over their purchased media)
were allowed to see every detail of how the system works, then they
would as a side effect know exactly how to break it. DRM
"standards" are therefore reliant on specific implementation. To
play FairPlay protected songs you need Apple iTunes. To play
anything branded with the doublespeak "PlaysForSure" you need either
Windows Media Player or the Windows Media libraries. RealPlayer is
required to play purchases from Rhapsody.

This makes preserving DRM-restricted iTMS purchases a fragile and
ugly affair. Not only do you need to back up your songs themselves,
but you also have to ensure that you'll still have a copy of iTunes
in the future and some means of running it; instead of a generic AAC
file that you can play on any computer, present or future, that has
an AAC player program, you're stuck dealing with an iTunes-only
file. Remember to save a copy of your iTMS Authorization Key too,
because who knows if the iTunes authorization servers will still be
running ten years from now.

There's no such thing as unrestrictive DRM. The entire point of
DRM is *to be* restrictive.

All DRM is unrestrictive because none of it works. It may be a
minor impediment to thieves, and a godsend to paranoiacs, but it
is only that. And it is utterly invisible to persons (such as me)
who are neither thieves nor paranoiacs.

I agree, no Mac or PC-based DRM really works against a sophisticated
and dedicated hacker. Actually, I think calling it a minor
impediment to thieves is a bit optimistic. On the other hand, DRM
is hardly invisible to those regular users who, like my friend, wish
to copy their iTunes purchases to a Creative MP3 player -- which, as
far as I can tell, falls under neither the "thief" nor the
"paranoiac" categories which you've attempted to pigeonhole DRM
detractors into. DRM is also a problem for those who wish to back
up their music collections for the long run, as illustrated above.

To sum it up, DRM frustrates end users who want to take their
rightfully purchased media beyond the officially condoned Microsoft
or Apple or Real walled gardens, sometimes forcing them to resort to
techniques which are technically illegal under the DMCA in order to
achieve what is in all other respects their legal right. I'm
willing to bet that enough people, even those whom we would not
typically consider "computer savvy", feel the same way that the
DRM-free approach of Amazon MP3 is really going to take off. You
don't need to be a computer engineer to recognize when you're being
prevented from doing what you want for no good reason other than
someone else's profit margin.

--
Mark Shroyer
http://markshroyer.com/
.

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