Cory Doctorow (of boingboing fame) wrote a nice column where he explains why DRM (Digital Rights Management) will never work. The article is intended to explain to non-technical people why DRM is impossible. It also explains why DRM only hurts people who actually go out and buy the content and NOT the pirates.

The thing is that when they say that you can’t travel than fast than the speed of light, they’re talking about the fundamental principles of physics: it’s impossible to get beyond lightspeed, even if science fiction movies help us conceptualise it.

In the same way, we can imagine building progressively better software locks for movies, music, ebooks, and software until we hit on one that even the wiliest hacker can’t defeat. But, just like the physicists, the geeks who say that DRM can never reach this point are speaking about fundamental principles of information science. It’s impossible to get that far.

Link.

A while ago I blogged about my experiences with the Air album WalkieTalkie. This album has (had?) some awful content protection mechanism. The protection caused the album to sound like a LP that had seen too many parties. Back in the days I talked to BMG about it, they offered to change the CD for a new one. Since I didn’t have the feeling this would change my experience, I made a copy of the album. The copy is working fine…

It was then that I decided to never, ever buy a CD again that contains Copy Protection or DRM.

That was for about 1,5 years. Nowadays SonyBMG has a different way of telling you, the buyer of their products, that they don’t like you: they silently install software on your PC. They even hide the software and the EULA states that you agree to this by inserting the CD into your PC.

The EULA has a lot of other rules. They would have been funny if they weren’t so serious.

Time for a new rule in my life: no more Copy Protection / DRM and nothing from SonyBMG anymore.

More information about the software installed by SonyBMG can be found here.

Update: boingboing has some updates about Sony, that make for an interesting read:

• Sony seems to be using another piece of software as well. Link.
• Sony filed a patent to make media you can no longer sell or loan. Link.
• Sony published an uninstaller for the first rootkit. This uninstaller leaves your pc open to the rest of the world. Link.
• Sony did not respect copyright laws with their first rootkit. The rootkit uses pieces of lame, an opensource audio encoder, but so far no sources have been published by Sony. Link.

2nd Update
And here is a very nice roundup of everything that happened with Sony since Halloween: Link.

Norway has decided to put a lot of TV and Radio (public channels) online. This could have been a great project, but the government of Norway decided to put all the content through Microsoft DRM. Thus giving Microsoft control over who can play the content, where and on what devices.

Boingboing’s Cory did a nice analysis on the topic, which got flamed by a Microsoft employee. It makes for a very good read. The best arguments against DRM can be found in the reaction by the Microsoft employee.

Link (via boingboing).

The inquirer has a nice rant about DRM and the upcoming products by Intel and Microsoft. It is a nice read, featuring all the arguments that could be summed up against those technologies (leaving out the pros for convenience).
Link.