UNINNOVATE / Engineering At Its Finest

Peter Gutmann, a computer scientist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, recently posted a paper online that chronicled the costs of new DRM technologies in Windows Vista, “in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost.” As an overall message, Gutmann declared that “The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.”

The paper received a massive response online from tech communities like slashdot. The response was so great that Dave Marsh, a Lead Program Manager responsible for Windows’ handling of video crafted an official response from Microsoft. The overall message of the response was:

• Yes, DRM in Windows Vista has costs and complications.
  
• However, Microsoft must cripple Vista to deliver HD-DVD and Blueray playback to consumers because of rules set out by the entertainment industry.
• And don’t get mad at Microsoft. They are just doing the same things that every other computer electronics device has to do for Blueray and HD-DVD support.
  

But the important distinction is that Microsoft’s software runs the majority of general use computers on this planet, while consumer electronics companies make stand-alone movie players that are going the way of the dinosaurs. Microsoft has a much higher responsibility because the devices they run are so much more important. In other words, Microsoft, the largest software company in the world, is allowing the movie industry to design subsystems of the most widely-used software on the planet in order to deliver support for what Bill Gates himself has called “the last generation of physical media”.

Microsoft’s helplessness to direct the industry is clearly noticeable in Dave Marsh’s opening comments:

“Windows Vista includes content protection infrastructure specifically designed to help ensure that protected commercial audiovisual content, such as newly released HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs, can be enjoyed on Windows Vista PCs. In many cases this content has policies associated with its use that must be enforced by playback devices. The policies associated with such content are applicable to all types of devices including Windows Vista PCs, computers running non-Windows operating systems, and standalone consumer electronics devices such as DVD players. If the policies required protections that Windows Vista couldn’t support, then the content would not be able to play at all on Windows Vista PCs. Clearly that isn’t a good scenario for consumers who are looking to enjoy great next generation content experiences on their PCs.”

Windows Vista Content Protection - Twenty Questions

Why is Microsoft accepting ultimatums from the movie industry? Sony was in the same position in the late 70’s and early 80’s when the movie industry famously tried to kill the VCR. Sony stood up and faced possible legal battles in order to deliver a product that people wanted to buy. If Sony had backed down, HD-DVD and Blueray would not even exist. But now in a nearly identical situation 30 years later, the newer and less self-confident Microsoft is unwilling to see any option but take orders from the Movie industry.

This exact scenario was covered in a famous talk given by Cory Doctorow three years ago to Microsoft Research:

Sony didn’t make a Betamax that only played the movies that
Hollywood was willing to permit — Hollywood asked them to do it,
they proposed an early, analog broadcast flag that VCRs could
hunt for and respond to by disabling recording. Sony ignored them
and made the product they thought their customers wanted.

I’m a Microsoft customer. Like millions of other Microsoft
customers, I want a player that plays anything I throw at it, and
I think that you are just the company to give it to me.

Yes, this would violate copyright law as it stands, but Microsoft
has been making tools of piracy that change copyright law for
decades now. Outlook, Exchange and MSN are tools that abet
widescale digital infringement.

More significantly, IIS and your caching proxies all make and
serve copies of documents without their authors’ consent,
something that, if it is legal today, is only legal because
companies like Microsoft went ahead and did it and dared
lawmakers to prosecute.

Microsoft stood up for its customers and for progress, and won so
decisively that most people never even realized that there was a
fight.

Do it again! This is a company that looks the world’s roughest,
toughest anti-trust regulators in the eye and laughs. Compared to
anti-trust people, copyright lawmakers are pantywaists. You can
take them with your arm behind your back.

Cory Doctorow’s Talk to Microsoft Research, June 17, 2004

Unfortunately, the Microsoft of today seems to share more in common with the corporate IBM of the 1980’s than the adventurous Microsoft of the 1980’s. Instead of leading, they have decided to appease.

The motto for Microsoft’s Zune mp3 player, its supposed iPod-killer, is “Welcome to the Social.” According to Brandweek, Microsoft is spending over $100 million on the “Welcome to the Social” advertising campaign to promote the Zune. With that kind of money invested, it would be helpful if the device lived up to the ads.

The key “social” feature of the Zune is the ability to for one Zune user to send songs to another user via a wireless connection. However, this feature is entangled with several restrictions:

• Audio files (songs, podcasts, etc.) transferred from one Zune to another can be played for up to three days or three plays, whichever comes first, after which it expires unless purchased or downloaded via the Zune Marketplace online.
• Recipients cannot re-send music or audio files that they have received via the sharing feature.
• Some DRM-protected songs are ineligible for sharing, as record companies can flag songs from the Zune Marketplace as “non-distributable”.

Wikipedia: Microsoft Zune

While the practicality of finding other Zune users in close proximity who have music and want to share is questionable enough, it appears it won’t do much good anyway. According to testing performed by Zunerama.com and ZuneThoughts.com, around 40%-50% of music falls under the “ineligible for sharing” limitation. Worse still, there is no way for the user to know what songs they are allowed to share until they try to share it.

So to summarize, a Zune user can join the social revolution by simply:

1. Finding another Zune user in the same room
2. Finding out if that user has music they are interested in
3. Be willing to live with a copy of that music that will only play three times
4. Be willing to step through the awkward process of transmitting the songs from one Zune to another
5. Not mind that 40% to 50% of the songs copied will fail due to “sharing limitations”

Yeah, Microsoft, this “social” thing sounds great. It’s amazing you aren’t selling more of these Zune things.

Companies that offer paid services are always trying to find new ways to convince users to hand over their credit cards and start paying. To entice as many new users as possible, most of these companies will offer free trial periods and will make signing up a quick and easy process. Unfortunately, many of these companies try to make canceling the service as hard as possible in the mistaken belief that you can earn customer loyalty through annoyance. In other words, if the service isn’t worth the money or is no longer useful to the customer, just make it nearly impossible to quit. If that doesn’t work and some of the customers manage to cancel, hit them with extra charges and let them try to sort out how to get refunds.

Tom Spring, a reporter for PC World in Boston, decided to take on the unenviable task of signing up for all sorts of free trials and seeing how hard it would be to cancel. In the resulting article entitled “Just Cancel the @#%$* Account!“, the results about as expected. Companies often make cancellation information hard or impossible to find, make the cancellation process long and confusing, and when the cancellation is complete, tack on extra charges.

According to PC World, here are some of the companies you should absolutely avoid if you wish to be able to cancel your account:

• AOL
• BlueMountain.com
• Classmates.com
• ESPN
• MSN Internet
• Napster.com
• NetZero
• Real Rhapsody
• Real SuperPass
• True.com

Now that customers have access to blogs and forums, these sort of business practices are even more ill-advised. When customers get annoyed, they start posting. In an attempt to retain customers, these companies end up with this kind of publicity:

The tagline for Jamendo.com reads “Welcome to our free music world.” It’s certainly not the whole world, but the site is growing quickly. Jamendo.com (whose name is a combination of the words “jam” and “crescendo”) provides over full 2000 albums for free. You can listen to tracks online with their web-based music player or you can download full albums in high quality using bittorrent. More importantly, all of the music is licensed with a Creative Commons license, so all of this is completely legal and encouraged by the artists. And if you find something you like, Jamendo.com lets you directly pay the artists whatever amount you choose.

Jamendo.com has several great community features. Users can tag music with descriptive terms like “jazz” or “ambient” to help other users find new music that they might like. Each tag is also available as an rss feed, so you can use an rss feed reader to subscribe to new music that matches your selected descriptive terms. The Jamendo community is also very active in rating and posting reviews of albums, so it is easy to see what is worth checking out. And for musicians looking for source material to sample or remix, Jamendo allows you to search for music by license so it’s easy to find artists that allow remixing and sampling.

Jamendo.com is the sort of thing that terrifies the major record labels: Free music with non-restrictive licensing available online in new and innovative ways. While most of these artists are clearly comfortable living in the long tail and not likely to start showing up in the Top 40 anytime soon, Jamendo.com is building a platform that can do things that other music stores can’t because of restrictive licensing. You can browse around Jamendo and create a playlist as you go. If you like the playlist, you can click a link to export it to your blog or save it as a podcast. Email the link to your friends and they can instantly listen to all the music, find other artists related to the ones that they liked, and pass it on to their friends. In other words, new and better ways of exploring music are possible because the music can go wherever the user wants it to go.

Other online music stores that rely on DRM to make music less copyable are also making it less useful and thus less valuable. While it is yet to be seen if Jamendo.com will appeal to anyone other than devoted music fans and musicians, it is clear that the types of things Jamendo is doing with music sharing and community interaction is quite a bit ahead of anything the music stores run by the major labels are doing.

Give it Jamendo.com a try with the tag-cloud below. Click on a tag to find music that matches the tag (the size of the text indicates the popularity of the tag):

acoustic alternative ambiance ambient atmospheric bass batterie blues breakbeat calme celtic chanson chansonfrancaise chansons chillout classique conceptalbum cool courdesmiracles culte dance dark delirant disco doux downtempo dub easylistening eclectic electrojazz electronica electropop electrorock emotion energique envoutant experimental festif film folk francaise french fun funk fusion genius gothic groove grunge guitar hardcore hardrock heavy hiphop house humour idm improvisation inclassable indie industrial instrumental jazz jazzrock latino live lounge melancolic melodic metal minimalist musique newage noise original piano planant poetique pop poprock postrock progressif progressive psychedelic punk rap reggae relax reposant rock rockfrancais rockindependant roots sensible ska solo sombre soul soundtrack space strange sympa synthetiseur techno texte textes trance trash trip triphop variete violon vocal voix world zen