meta-roj

the theme of the week appears to be drm and music… today’s story comes from slashdot on the drm-wrapped beastie boys release.

i can’t get to the beastie boys site or security focus, so i’m just guessing that the response from the beastie boys fanbase is a bit stronger than the one from velvet revolver. maybe more on this when the furor has subsided a bit… but maybe not.

update (2004.06.21 02:44): boingboing has a second-hand statement reportedly from the band on the issue.

in a sort of follow up to the “what are they thinking?” what are they thinking?” post yesterday, i fumble my way into the news that macrovision is buying installshield.

Macrovision To Acquire InstallShield Software Corporation

“Our software developer customers have told us that they want seamless solutions that will allow them to price, package, protect, deliver, install and update their software, allowing them to focus on development and release of their products,” stated Bill Krepick, president and CEO of Macrovision.

so, for the analysts out there – does this mark a diversification strategy for macrovision? a recognition that their bread-and-butter drm market has a limited life, or is this company convinced that they can deliver on their promises to “eliminate piracy and unlicensed use” and “get paid every time”?

contraband is, in one definition, goods or merchandise whose importation, exportation, or possession is forbidden, which gives me a nice, fat ironic platform to sit myself upon.

i last toyed with sunncomm back in november as a sort of brief wrap-up to a series of posts on the drm-hackjob that is the sunncomm cd protection technology (1, 2, 3, 4).

with cory’s piece on drm fresh in my mind and some news about the first sunncomm-drm-protected #1 cd in the united states (“contraband” from velvet revolver), i thought it was time to take a bit of a break from the stupid-government-tricks phase here at meta-roj and jump back into the business-of-music stuff a bit.

since we last explored sunncomm, they have changed their name (now sunncomm international as opposed to sunncomm technologies) and acquired dark noise technologies in an attempt to expand their cd-protection regime to cover the analog hole. they’ve also apparently learned several lessons from the famous shift-key debacle – their “marketing and sales arm” is called quiettiger now. the quieter, the better, no doubt. they’ve also inked deals with emi and a few other companies.

now, i haven’t actually worked the darknoise gimmick, and i don’t even know if it’s present on the velvet revolver cd, but this is what they have to say about thier widget:

winston keech of darknoise, in stereophile

The technology, called ‘Q-Spoiler’, works by encoding the original digital audio file with a unique hidden signal. The signal is embedded in the audio master and becomes an indelible part of the actual audio file in addition to aiding in subsequent origin identification. Should the original CD be copied, so, too, is the hidden signal and identification ‘tag.’ Unless [it is] illegally invoked, the listener is unaware of the hidden signal’s presence. Attempts to illegally copy the protected audio using analog recording devices, analog-to-digital converters, or psychoacoustic compression codes, such as MP3, will invoke the hidden signal which transforms to become audible within the range of human hearing, thus ruining the unauthorized copy

we’ve discussed drm as “damage” (with another nod to kevin), but this is literally damaging the audio in the hope of making drm stick.

drm won’t stick.

cory explains just how drm is bad mojo. kevin’s said drm destroys value for a long time. even steve jobs knows about the future of drm (since then, apple has pretty much lost that religion). and i guess you know by now that i agree. in fact, one of the main reasons i think there is a lot of life left in the cd format is because it’s from an age of innocence where decent digital technology was unencumbered by silly drm overhead. the basic cd is just that – basic. no region-coding, no shift-key happening, no software-installing – it’s just a 12 centimeter chunk of polycarbonate that happens to hold music and works in billions of gadgets.

perhaps darknoise will work in the short-term because the sound of current-generation cd’s is simply awful, and the darknoise noise won’t sound any worse than the clipped-off transients the recording industry is imposing on us all. perhaps it’s enugh to save sunncomm from oblivion (their stock price has popped up to 16 cents or so with all the good news), but fundamentally, they’re annoying consumers. they apparently believe that annoying just a small percentage of customers is a legitimate tradeoff in this business model:

peter jacobs, sunncomm ceo [news.com]

We hear from less than half of one percent of people who have the Velvet Revolver disc. Most of those questions are related to getting the songs onto an iPod.

billboard reports that the contraband package sold 256,000 units in its first week. half of one percent of 256,000 is 1280. worse, the people who are annoyed or inconvenienced by this drm wrapper might just be the ones with the most influence – brandon fuller, shane cartmill, tom johnson, eric olsen and others will be talking about this for a while.

i hope sunncomm has their call center pumped up to handle the volume as the rest of the buyers face interesting questions about why their cd doesn’t do what they thought it should do. there’s a label on the package that says the cd is “protected against unauthorized duplication” – so some people might not be buying. they’ll never know how the release could’ve done if it weren’t wrapped in drm – i’m quite sure the music is already “out on the net” – anyone with a mac and an internet connection didn’t even have to hold the shift key.

Shane Cartmill

The first test was to rip the CD into AAC format in iTunes for transfer to my iPod. It worked flawlessly just like any other CD. Next I popped the CD into my trusty Mac, opened Toast and clicked copy. Five minutes later I had a perfect reproduction of the disc. In the words of Johnny Bench in the old Krylon Paint commercials, “no runs, no drips, no errors.” Finally, I tested it in every CD device I owned – seven total. The disc played fine at home, in the computer, on the road and in the portable CD devices.

the bigger issue is the relative value of the drm-wrapped polycarbonate version, which is conveniently addressed elsewhere in the same post:

Shane Cartmill

What angered me is that iTunes offers Contraband for $9.99 and I can burn it 7 times and transfer it to unlimited iPods. But purchasing the actual disc for four dollars more gave me more restrictions.

i’m not railing against drm because i’m pro-consumer, or pro-music-pirate or even pro-boston-strangler. to me, it’s a fairly simple business case. licensing the drm technology increases the cost of each unit, and having the drm wrapper on the cd can only negatively impact unit sales (short and long term), so i don’t understand why this industry is so interested in this stuff.

while i’ve been busy filling this space with silly material on governments gone awry, other people are out there addressing the important issues. one of them is cory, who has taken a little of his precious time to explain to microsoft that all the money they’ve poured into drm is… well. bad.

if you still need convincing… read that.

demonstrating traction in the drm-free universe, download business bleep is carrying the entire back catalog of warp records (electronica, including aphex twin).

breaking with the establishment (and even the downward spiral), bleep is offering drm-free high-quality (typically 205kbps vbr) mp3’s at $1.35/track (a 36% premium) or up to about $10 per album.

bleep – faq

Bleep music has no DRM or copy protection built in. We believe that most people like to be treated as customers and not potential criminals – DRM is easily circumvented and just puts obstacles in the way of enjoying music. Apple has even privately stated that they decided to use a weak form of DRM solely to get major labels onboard.

kevin would be proud.

update: discussion at slashdot and metafilter.

al3x just documented audible.com’s drm failing the all-important and critical-for-wide-adoption mom-test.

and now that i’ve shared that, i have to really consider writing the passive/active rant….

rolling stone

When we first went to talk to these record companies — about eighteen months ago — we said, “None of this technology that you’re talking about’s gonna work. We have Ph.D.s here who know the stuff cold, and we don’t believe it’s possible to protect digital content.”

of course, this isn’t new lots of us have been talking about it in one form or another, but now that the steve has spoken, will anyone listen? (kevin gets props on this one, because it might be his memo… 🙂 )

since i started talking about sunncomm, it’s been a bit of a saga here (1, 2, 3, 4), and i’ve used it as an example to emphasize a few of my own thoughts or theories.

i left myself a note to come back and look again, and there really isn’t much to say… (that’s not terribly surprising)…

here’s the little bit of sunncomm news i could find: on october 29, sunncomm announced their latest deal for cd-damaging (to quote kevin) code. since then, the stock price has dropped 30% (from 10 cents to 7).

for all the bloggers out there that followed this story along with me (i hope i got everyone), the bright light on sunncomm haasn’t killed it yet.

a quick thanks to everyone who bounced thoughts around with me. i’ll probably revisit sunncomm again later, if i can still find them.

in an expected move, and something kevin marks will no doubt appreciate, sony (wedding bmg) has released the new naturally seven cd in germany with it’s second-session copy protection widget, called ConnecteD. (i say expected, because bmg is now infamous here at meta-roj for their adventures with with sunncomm).

this reuters story contains an interesting quote…

all copy-protections can be hacked,” [sony music chief technology officer phil] wiser said. “but if give people what they are asking for in terms of value, they won’t go out and steal it. it’s called trusting the consumer.

well, trusting them… this much, anyway.

key developments: they are labeling the disc indiciating they have “copy protected” it, and sony’s trying to make up for the drm-value reduction by adding value.

just another wrinkle in the road….

in a front-page article in usa today, we find a brief presentation of the sunncomm story (1 2 3 4).

i think this counts as “more light on sunncomm” – this is “mainstream” and “non-technical” mass-market press. a couple bits are worth mentioning…

Jacobs knew nothing of Halderman’s research until shareholders started calling. He’d pulled SunnComm out of a crater during three years of tech-industry malaise, he says, and Halderman was out to ruin it. “He wanted to embarrass the record industry and put us out of business,” Jacobs says. “I had to launch a public defense.

jacobs still doesn’t quite get it… first, it’s very dangerous to go on the record declaring the intentions of other people. second, this wasn’t about putting sunncomm out of business (surely, there’s an easier way to do that…) i don’t want to commit the sin i just decried, but it seems to me that “the secret” would’ve “gotten out” no matter where this scheme originated or who decided to tease it apart. jacobs seems to have taken this very personally – and that probably resulted in a lot more damage to sunncomm.

BMG considers SunnComm’s system “an important first generation of the next generation of technology,” says spokesman Nathaniel Brown.

He offers proof from the sales of the Hamilton CD. Unprotected CDs typically see sales drop 35% to 45% in the second week, as pirated versions circulate. Sales of the Hamilton CD fell just 23%.

this is an interesting new spin on piracy that i hadn’t heard before…

intuitively, it doesn’t make sense. first, it only takes one person with autorun disabled to “spew the data forth unto the p2p networks” – and that certainly happened. second, this is all relative. maybe the hamilton cd just sucks and nobody’s buying it. i’m not privy to the raw data, of course, so i’m just guessing…

SunnComm has a new version of its technology ready. BMG plans to use it. The other major record labels are interested.

so much for my crystal ball… i wonder if this statement will ever be reflected in sunncomm’s bottom line.