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The DEVIL has a name...
D.R.M.: "Digital","Rights", "Management"... Rings a bell? If not, sooner or later you'll have to suffer through a rude awakening. DRM is a general term used to describe a large ensemble of programs specifically engineered to "protect" (and I use the term loosely) songs, movies and other files distributed either through the net or on a physical support such as DVDs and CDs. In essence, DRM programs were fabricated and incorporated directly into a file to restrict those who purchase it from either making copies or using it in a manner the corporation distributing it might find unacceptable.
So far so good. Nothing wrong with that you might say right? After all, those distribution companies are losing billions of dollars in revenues, or so they claim, to the enormous number of people who copy DVDs and CDs and share them either with their friends or through sharing networks such as Kaaza for example. By implementing those new products with a feature that would restrict their usage to paying customers, they figure that they are simply protecting their interests and are desperatly clinging to the hope that by doing so they might counteract the effect piracy might have on their profits.
Well, I've got news for them. What they proclaim to be lost profits are only wishful extrapolations of revenues which are not based on reality. They assume that every copy made is a lost sale. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most people don't pirate movies or songs. They don't even know how and most of them don't have the time or wouldn't bother even if they did. They're respectful customers who are happy to pay for a legitimate copy of a good product in support of the artist who created it.
And let's face it, people with little money to spare are the majority in this world. Those rich companies are so out of touch with reality because most people are like me, struggling with money every day of their lives. Let's not forget that about 80% of all the money in the world is actually controlled by a minuscule 5% of the total population, an insane paradox if I ever heard one. So excuse me if I have a hard time being sympathetic to a company like Microsoft who makes billions of dollars every year and that now is launching this new and very expensive operating system, the horrible Vista only to extract more money out of their already saturated market.
There are some people who might copy a few movies and songs here and there that is true. But most of them would never dream of making a business out of it like true hardcore pirates. They simply wish to sample an artist's work to find out if they like it and then buy a legitimate copy to support that artist which they are happy to do. And this is priceless marketing that those companies should actually encourage. It's been proven by history time and time again that in a way, piracy encourages sales more than anything. How? By letting consumers sample something for free, most of them will only be too happy to pay a decent amount of money to actually enjoy that art in a legal manner.
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Let's face it, the percentage of people who actually are hardcore pirates is extremely small. By pirates I mean the people who rip off a movie and make copies to be sold illegally on the black market. Those people are so well organized that they usually offer a movie rip off on the streets the day it is released in theaters. That's how fast it can be. They are not going to be affected by any measure those companies might take. And DRM schemes are rendered obsolete very quickly since it usually takes weeks or even days for some technical geeks and hackers to crack any DRM technologies that companies spent billions of dollars and years to develop.
We're talking about computer geniuses here who can crack anything and they would never even bother to buy a legitimate copy. For them, paying a huge company who already earns billions of dollars makes no sense but supporting a struggling artist might ironically enough. And you know what? I love those people. A digital pirate is often someone very intelligent who is cracking software mostly to help others because he believes an injustice has been done to the people. You might say many of them found their inner Robin Hood and I applaud that cause without them, we all would be at the mercy of giant corporations trying to control our lives more and more.
And DRM is an injustice to everyone. They are nothing but abusive tools used by companies like Microsoft with Vista and Sony with Blu-Ray to create a way to control what every customer does with the products they purchase. Several huge corporations earned enormous amounts of money selling DVDs and CDs. But at some point, they saw an inevitable decline in their profits over the years and decided to put the blame on piracy, becoming insanely paranoid about people "stealing" their products. Therefore they spent years investing huge budgets to develop technologies that would restrict the way people use digital files like MP3s, DVDs and CDs, robbing them of their rights of fair use.
And ironically, the people who are negatively affected the most by DRMs are the average customer and the artist. That's right, the artist. I am an artist and a consumer so that gives me a perspective on both sides and let me tell you, what is coming in the future is a big bad mess. I create, write, compose, produce, arrange, sing and give everything I have to make the greatest songs I can possibly make in the hopes that some people might like what I do. And as you probably know, I have a first album completed with 15 songs of which I am very proud. And my strategy has been to offer 4 of those songs completely free in MP3 and of course, without any protection whatsoever. But you might wonder why as an artist would I want to give my songs away?
First of all, I am not well known at all and most have never heard of me. I am a struggling singer/songwriter who is desperately trying to get my music out there like so many starving artists. So I figured that by offering free songs from my album and by posting them all over the net, people who stumble upon them will give me a chance and listen to what I do. Hopefully a few of them will like what they hear and I consider it an honor that they would download my songs, copy them and share them with their friends. But as an artist, why would I hope for such a thing you might wonder? After all it was a lot of work and why would I encourage piracy which allegedly could take away any chance I have of making a financial profit?
I don't necessarily encourage piracy per say, I just want people to hear my music so that I can prove to them my worth as an artist. Then I am convinced that if people like what I do, they will buy my album either through download or maybe even on a regular CD once I can afford to print copies. But why would they do that if they already have most of my songs for free on MP3? That's the thing that big corporations don't understand but I do. I have my heart and soul invested into my art. For me those songs are not commodities built to maximize my profits, they're pieces of my inner being aimed at expressing things I couldn't emote otherwise.
People will buy my CD eventually I hope because they'll want to support me. Also, many like me love to get the CD with all the trimmings, the lyrics, the pictures not to mention a much higher sound quality. MP3s sound fine but they're not the highest quality you can ever find. A CD will always sound better because you get uncompressed music. Some people might still simply wish to get the physical copy of the CD. Even today with all the MP3 technology, I personally still prefer to pop in a CD in my drive and play it.
Customers deserve to make their own choices. And that's what truly gets me about those big companies. They infect their products on purpose with DRM schemes while selling them to customers who pay through the nose for the privilege of getting restricted material. As if they didn't want to sell you the music or movies but rather to loan it to you while retaining full control of what you do with it. How ridiculous. They have to realize that they could sell a lot more if they enticed customers with attractive packaging and bonuses instead of trying to penalize them with products infected with DRM schemes to limit their rights.
Because that's what DRM does, it makes a perfectly good product prone to numerous problems for the poor customer who simply wanted to buy and use it as he sees fit. For instance on DRM infected CDs and downloaded MP3 tracks with DRM protection, you can't listen to them anywhere you want. You have to use either a special player on your computer or use a regular CD player. It might work on some players but then again it might not, depending on the level of protection and DRM structure used to protect the CD.
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I don't know if you heard about this already but a while ago, the Sony company was caught in a big scandal concerning protected CDs. Sony is probably the worst offender in this with their Blu-Ray fiasco. I'll write more about it a bit later but now, let's concentrate on CDs. Sony integrated a rootkit into CDs from different artist which was intended to protect the music from being copied and also, acted as spyware to monitor what people were doing on their computers. Think I'm exaggerating? I'm not making any of this up, you can do search all over the net and you'll find plenty of examples.
That rootkit would install itself on the computer of someone who tried to play the CD through their CD/DVD drive. The worst part is that it wouldn't even inform the user that it was installing itself so you wouldn't get any warning that something was being put on your computer without your consent. It would then create a player which was essential to play the music. This means that you couldn't even choose which player to play your music with, Sony would do that for you. But that's not the worst part.
The thing is that not only would you not know that the rootkit was there but it would actually monitor your activity, in essence spying on you. And there wasn't even an uninstall feature so it was impossible for the average user to deactivate it. This rootkit actually destroyed many computer systems because it was a gateway that hackers and spyware could use to get into a machine. I read an article where a very qualified computer "geek" had a lot of problems trying to get rid of this rootkit. So you can imagine how difficult it could be for someone who doesn't much about computers?
Sony took a lot of flack for this and had to take those CDs off the market, offering refunds and apologizing profusely if not sincerely but the deed has been done. When a company invades someone's computer and install things on it without that person's consent to restrict the usage of a product, a line has been crossed. I for one can't trust Sony anymore and even though they're not the only company trying to control what their customers do with a product, they seem to be the ones more agressive about it. Which brings me to the whole HD-DVD/Blu-Ray debacle...
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What a big disgusting mess. I'm not sure what percentage of people are actually aware of this since High Definition television is still in its infancy but a war has been won. Blu-Ray and Sony are declaring victory over the demise of HD-DVD. As you probably know, High Definition or HD is a process where a movie is encoded at a much higher definition than regular or "Standard" DVDs which we all know and love. In essence, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray were 2 competing formats which both wanted to replace standard DVDs with a supposedly higher quality image and sound. The image resolution is 6 times higher with 1920X1080 compared to a maximum of 720x480 you get with regular DVDs.
This means that a movie in either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD has a better image and sound quality (up to a certain point) but there is a catch. You would need a HDMI compliant flat screen television of at least 42 inches to even notice the difference except maybe for those computer geeks and professionals who have laser sharp vision and can detect any anomaly. And those television although cheaper than they were are still very expensive and for many regular consumers, still out of reach.
But what is so ridiculous about all this is that there would actually be 2 competing formats. I mean, what's the point? Do you remember the VHS/Beta war in the 80s? Beta was put on the market by Sony (why am I not surprised) while VHS ended up being made by a lot of different companies. And even though Beta was the superior format technically and is still used for broadcasting to this day, VHS won and Beta completely disappeared from the mainstream market with video-clubs only carrying out VHS copies.
The reason is that 2 formats simply couldn't survive because it becomes too confusing for people with the regular DVD also present for a total of 3 formats. Can you imagine what kind of mess we're getting into? Video-clubs carrying several versions in different formats of the same movies? And with all those "extended", "ultimate" and "you gotta own this" versions being rehashed and resold many times to customers, we get the same old content but repackaged in a slightly different manner. But in effect, we are rebuying the same movies over and over again.
And of course, the reason why I mention this war is because both HD-DVD (may God rest its soul) and Blu-Ray have incorporated massive amounts of DRM schemes in their players and discs to keep people from being able to copy them. The idea of protecting content from piracy isn't so bad in itself but it's the idea that they're penalizing people who buy legitimate copies that bothers me. With DRM, like with any technology, the risk is that defects and bugs would actually make a legitimate copy of a certain movie be declared pirated and therefore unplayable in some legitimate player of that particular format, creating a false positive so to speak.
No technology is full proof and when it tries to restrict what people do, it can actually become a nightmare with multiple companies trying to force their own format or way of doing things on competing corporations and the buying public as a whole. Something as simple as a scratch on your Blu-Ray movie Disc for example could trigger the player to think that you are trying to play a pirated copy making the machine shut down and become useless so you would have to buy another player. That's right, welcome to the DRM world.
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Microsoft joined the effort against piracy and recently launched its new operating system Vista. Heard about it yet? Of course you have. It is supposed to replace Windows XP or at least Microsoft is desperetaly trying to cling to the illusion that it will. But let me tell you this and even if it's the only thing you remember about my article, then at least I'll have done my part: don't ever install or buy a copy of Windows Vista!
Vista is by far the worst and most insidious operating system Microsoft has ever produced and they've been guilty of quite a few clunkers in their day. Vista contains numerous DRM schemes that are totally integrated into the system making it this bloated, slow and dangerous operating system. Why? For instance, to run Vista you need 2 GB of RAM memory which even by today's standard is quite a lot. So do you get a system that is faster or more efficient than one with XP? Not on your life.
Vista is such a CPU hog that if you have less than 1 GB of RAM it simply won't function. The reason is that those DRM applications take up so much memory to run that it renders your computer to a slow crawl. For instance, 30 times a second the machine scans every hardware and software in your system. Why? To make sure that no hacking is going on or that you, the consumer, is not doing something illegal like say, play a DRM-free MP3 song on a player that Microsoft doesn't approve of or encode something you're not supposed to or who knows what else...
I read this story in a forum online where a man who had Vista on his machine tried to install a small program to play videos and MP3 that he liked. But since it wasn't approved by Microsoft, Vista simply refused to install it. I'm not sure if you can see the implications of that but this is like Big Brother from the movie "1984" with John Hurt and Richard Burton. 1984 was a novel where people lived in a society controlled by the state where everything was deemed a crime, especially sex and everyone was monitored and controlled by this dictatorial government. I remember being shaken to the core by this movie as I saw it pretty early in my life. The notion of government control has always been a terrifying reality to me.
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If Vista succeeds in being implemented on a large scale this could mean a lot less choices for consumers. Competition is what drives the markets but if Microsoft controls what goes on in every Vista machine, they can litterally destroy their competitors by stopping any software that is not Microsoft approved from being installed. Google is an example of one of the many huge companies suing Microsoft with years of legal delays in the works. And Vista is such a paranoid system that even if you want to do something as simple as delete or rename a file, a pop-up window asking "are you sure you want to do this?" appears so many times for even the most simple function that it drives the user crazy. What a marvel of technology... Geez. And if you decide to deactivate it after a while like any sane person would do who simply wants to get on with the work, you get another recurrent pop-up warning that this safety feature is off and should be reinstated.
To give you an idea of the ramifications of this, on a Vista machine there isn't a true administrator account where the person is allowed to do anything they want. On a XP machine, everyone has at least one full administrator account which is normal. After all, it is your computer isn't it? But Microsoft supposedly decided that you are too dumb or clumsy to be allowed to change certain things so they created this account where parts of your system are restricted to you. Pretexting this as a measure to keep hackers and spyware away making the machine more secure. But of course, it's a disguised way of taking away your freedom and trying to control what you do on your own machine and that's just plain insane.
Therefore I beg of you, don't buy Vista nor Blu-Ray or Music with DRM and insist on buying a computer with XP installed. Those things infested with DRMs are nothing more than big companies trying to squeeze every bit of money out of you while infecting your systems with a bunch of controls limiting your freedom and infringing on your rights as a consumer. Instead support artists like me and so many others who are struggling to offer the best possible product they can, free of DRM. We have to fight this evil before it destroys our freedom which we can't take for granted anymore. A war is raging and who wins is not clear at the moment but there will be a lot of casualties and consumers as well as artists are the ones who are going to suffer the most.
THE ENDLESS UPGRADE GRIND
Do you remember a time when you did an upgrade on some program and got real benefits from it? Some bugs were fixed, nice new useful features, a stable application... Now those days are gone for good it seems. Personally, I stopped upgrading most of my programs a few years ago when I started to notice that programs which were working fine before the upgrade started to act up and break down or try to take more and more control away from the user. You know what I'm talking about. Every program out there who is launched on the unsuspecting public contains bugs as not one of them is ever perfect. But while there was a time where we could trust that those updates were there to help us get the best experience online, now I personally lost that trust forever.
And I remember vividly the day I started to get suspicious. It was when I tried to install the new service pack SP2 from Microsoft on my XP machine. I have bought a legitimate copy of Windows XP back in 2002 at the same time I decided to buy a brand new computer that I needed to help me realize my many artistic projects. Even though there were some issues at first especially due to the fact that I didn't use a firewall at the time, so I got hacked like 3 times in a row and finally had to learn. So I bought (yeah the pro version) the Zone Alarm firewall which I have been using since then and I'm very satisfied with it. No hacking of any kind after that and my system became well protected.
At that time I was also using Norton Anti-virus but for some reason, it never worked well on my machine. I heard about it since then, how Norton is too bloated and doesn't do the job well. So I got AVG Anti-virus for free at first and decided to pay up when they switched to a pro version that we had to "rent" for a yearly fee. Well, I thought that wasn't fair on their part to decide to charge after offering a free service for so long but frankly, I like it and it's very efficient so I bit the bullet and coughed up once again. But recently I switched to AVast anti-virus and it works well while being totally free.
I don't necessarily mind paying for a service on the net but it can really add up and I am not a rich man at all. Money was and is always very tight so I gotta be very careful. Well suffice it to say that I also got several anti-spyware over the years to earn extra protection but I had to realize that most of them are not enough in themselves so I got many to do the job well, SpyWare Doctor, Ad-Aware and XoftSpySE are the ones I've been using the longest with varying degrees of satisfaction but with many of them, at least I can get fully protected cause those spyware progress so fast that you can't be ever safe with only one anti-spyware.
When I installed the new SP2 update from Microsoft without thinking as we all become programmed to do, I started to get weird bugs and several of my applications on which my job depends started to get problems and crashed on several occasions. The fan for my CPU also stopped functionning for some weird reason and that's why I had to go to a specialized computer store to change it. Well, the technical expert there told me that he had noticed many people with the same problems because they had installed SP2. So he suggested I uninstall it and start over.
I'll never forget what happened next. While we were waiting for the service pack to uninstall, we both noticed that the fans which had stopped working suddenly came back to life! Somehow, service pack 2 had some configuration installed that dictated my fans to stop working if it considered that the system didn't need it but there must have been some bug there cause everybody knows that a CPU unit NEEDS a fan on it all the time. The guy and I looked at each other with knowning glances and sure enough, with my system back to SP1, all my previous problems just disappeared.
I'm not telling you to uninstall SP2 if it works for you cause obviously, there were some good patches in it necessary for most to enjoy the net in a safer manner. But I wouldn't recommend XP Service Pack 3 already having many problems associated with Vista like endless reboots and several bugs. But that's when I realized that those upgrades Microsoft was trying to push on all of us were not necessarily for our own good but more for theirs. And even though I tried to install a few updates from Microsoft after that, I completely stopped the day I saw that they introduced this wonderful new toy they call "WGA" or Windows Genuine Advantage.
The word "Advantage" here is not appropriate at all. It's actually a small program that Microsoft imposed on all of us that determines if our copy of Windows is legitimate. I bought mine so you might think that I shouldn't worry about it and just install the thing to get the updates. But some flag got raised in my mind. Especially when they explained that this little wonder of technology could NOT be uninstalled. So once you install it, you're stuck with it. And since I am always very careful about what I install on my system, I made searches and quickly discovered that WGA holds no benefice to customers at all. It's simply a way for Microsoft to control what we do and brand us pirates by default until we prove to them that we are not criminals.
From then on, I decided never to patch my Windows XP again and it's been many years already. Sure I have to be careful as everyone should be, even more so since my Windows XP is not patched to the hilt with the latest from Microsoft. But so far, never had any problems related to that. But it's also because I am careful. I use good protection and never click or open attachments unless I know it's a specific file I requested from someone I trust. I also try to keep my browsing to a minimum to sites I need and stay away from porn and crack sites. I mean, we all know what to do and not do and it's a simple way of conducting ourselves on the net in a secure and bright manner.
So once I stopped upgrading the Microsoft stuff, I also pretty much stopped upgrading all the other programs too except for those applications like anti-virus and such. Those have to be upgraded on a regular basis but then again, we don't have to jump on the bandwagon of upgrading every single thing every time a new version comes out. Newer doesn't necessarily mean better or more secure nowadays. It just means that our new version of a program we like might end up containing more crap like ads and features we don't need and also, cause some conflict with another software we use. If it ain't broken, why fix it? I personally stopped and my system has never worked better. And thank God for Norton Ghost cause as soon as I get a problem I can't fix, I simply put another image of my partition on top and get my system back the way it was, functioning properly without me wanting to throw it out the window.
So all of you who are not sure about Vista and think you should simply upgrade to the latest version just because Microsoft says so, think about it long and hard. If your current system works with XP and is stable, why switch? A good operating system is intended to get out of your way and allow you to use your appplication in a safe and stable manner. Vista might look pretty to some with its Aero 3D features and such but while those might be enjoyable a few times, you soon get fed up with having to wait for your window to minimize and for some animated feature to stop cavorting around and just let you do your work.
XP always stays out of my way, is compatible with practically every software and hardware out there and is very stable. What more could I ask for? And what if Microsoft stops supporting it in 2008? Why would I care? I stopped upgrading it a very long time ago and it's still working very well. Actually, I suspect it works even better than if I had insisted on following this incessant updating trend where they tell us that a version of what we have is not good enough and needs to be tweaked. They use to be trustworthy on that front with upgrades by fixing bugs but now, it's mostly a way to shove down our throat new ways of controlling what we do.
WGA has been introduced in XP and of course is integrated in Vista in ways that are even more hurtful for customers. I seriously think that Microsoft who is seeing this new trend now that people are fighting back needs to be told off. It has enjoyed a huge monopoly for way too long and now that Vista doesn't sell as much as they had hoped and where XP systems are becoming even more desirable to a good portion of their customer base, they had to cave and support XP for longer than anticipated. And it's so weird in a way that they would try to kill XP this way. After all, it's THEIR product isn't it? So what's the difference if people buy XP or Vista, the money goes into their pocket. But the difference is that while XP is very stable and does the job well, it doesn't contribute to a surge in their profits like they were hoping a brand new operating system like Vista would. So they would like nothing more than to kill their previous product which is so insane.
Don't let yourself be a victim of this upgrade merry-go-round. Don't automatically download and install updates from different cies. Do a little search on Google or Yahoo, be informed. Cause even if in the past you could trust that by installing a new version you would get better functionality, it's just not true anymore. And with Vista anyway, I heard that Microsoft does updates with everyone even if you decide to deactivate the automatic updates. I mean, this is so sneaky and should signal to all of us that trusting them blindly just doesn't cut it anymore.
BE INTEGRATED: The video
Probably the best song on Utopia, "Be Integrated" is a perfect track to be linked to this cause with its theme about integration and living in a protected bubble while trying to block out the evil lurking outside. The concept of the clip revolves around a big red DRM sign constantly trying to shut down the video in different ways to illustrate just how insidious, malevolent and restrictive it can be. We used 2 performances I did live at Releves En Folies with clothes by fashion designers Erzuly and Station 8.
As an artist who strongly believes in the issue, I have recently signed up with
Bad Vista
an organization trying to inform people about Vista and other DRM infected applications. I urge you to sign up and help the cause. And if they are willing, I would love nothing more than grant them total freedom in using my video in any way they would see fit to help inform people about their rights to digital freedom. The scariest thing in all of this is that most people have no idea what DRM is and how it can poison their existence. Already, most new computers come with Vista pre-installed even if there is still a strong demand for new systems with XP. Microsoft has the power to simply refuse to sell XP anymore and impose Vista on the buying public.
And the repercussions of that might take a long while to show but let's not kid ourselves about this. At some point in the not so distant future, if we stand back and do nothing, we might live in a world where most computers would become nothing more than media showcases controlled by a giant corporation that could decide what you could and could not do, hear or watch on your own computer. And that to me is simply unacceptable. I will fight to the end. Fans and artists, let's all unite. Spread the word before it's too late and join our ranks. Our digital freedom is at stake.