against DRM ... again
So I bought a copy of the latest album by "Instituto Mexicano de Sonido" and it had this tiny little freebie promo CD with it.
I love promo freebies because you normally get all sorts of odd outtakes, tracks that almost made it onto the album and material that can best be described as "non-commercial" i.e. plenty of material for a chill out dj.
I wanted to mix a track of this promo CD with something else so I popped it into the CD player.
That was a big mistake.
My CD players are cheap ones - I didn't know whether I'd take to CD DJ'ing so I dipped my toe in the water first - and although these players have nice big wheels on top to manipulate the CD the load mechanism is a pinch-roller front-loading kind-of thing.
When I stuck the little CD into the player it went in off-centre - the player didn't recognise that it had a CD in it and it refused to eject the non-existent CD.
Eventually I persuaded the CD to come out, but not after many minutes of cursing - I thought I'd have to dismantle the whole thing - and it didn't help that I'd had to dismantle the DVD player the day before to get a stuck rental DVD out of the player - the sticker on top had worked loose and jammed the DVD.
So I cursed and fumed and cursed some more for a (long) while amd eventually got the CD to eject by pressing another CD into the slot and triggering the mechanism. There was no pin-hole - so a paperclip would not have helped.
To get round the problem I popped the promo mini CD into my computer, popped a CDR into the other drive and made a copy of it - 20 minutes later I could mix the CD all I wanted.
A natural reaction in the circumstances - after all I wanted to play my music on my CD player but the format was wrong.
But - of course - I then considered what would have happened if the CD had been copy or DRM protected?
At best I might have not been able to copy the CD and listen to the music I had purchased on the CD player of my choice, but at worst I could have installed nasty spyware type DRM onto my computer which opened it up to all kinds of malware.
Luckily "Love Monk" records don't use DRM but the story could have ended quite differently.
Let's give a big hand to Love Monk records .. they might be small but they don't foist unwanted spyware onto their customers.
My major concern is that if DRM slowly spreads - eventually even the smaller companies will be forced to use it - and it's a small step from a-hole legislation that governs hardware to even more rules that govern content.
Imagine it being illegal to deliver content without DRM? Sounds crazy? Sure .... but so does the whole of the rest of the DRM story.
All I know is - if I buy a DRM protected product that I cannot play because my player doesn't support it - and I can't copy it - then someone has effectively stolen that content from me.
Today it didn't happen - but what about tomorrow?
