"Big Brother....is Watching YOU!" by Chaotic Good01 on Flickr (CC-BY)

David Pogue reports on his blog that Amazon has secretly pulled electronic copies of 1984 and Animal Farm purchased on its Kindle service:

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

According to Amazon, the person who let Amazon sell the copies of the books in question didn’t have the rights to them:

“These books were added to our catalog using our self-service platform by a third-party who did not have the rights to the books,” Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener said in an e-mail. “When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers.”

Herdener said Amazon won’t handle things the same way in the future. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances.”

It’s understandable for Amazon to be confused as to who holds what rights on these books; most of Orwell’s books are in the public domain in some countries — Australia is one example — but not, for instance, in the US or the UK. Even so, this incident only makes plain, for those who didn’t already know, the pitfalls of investing in closed systems like the Kindle Store and iTunes; there, not only do you have no rights to what you have purchased, but you may have no choice to unpurchase something, should they deem it necessary or desirable.

• New York Times blog entry
• CNet reporting on statement from Amazon

"Money Clip Shuffle" by re-ality on Flickr (CC-BY)

Apple’s third iteration of the iPod Shuffle contains a nasty surprise for consumers — headphones with DRM:

[...]the new shuffle doesn’t fully work with any headphones except Apple’s. Because of what Apple has done here—something sneaky and arguably terrible for consumers, especially if it continues with other iPod and iPhone products in 2009—if you plug your old third-party headphones of any sort into the new shuffle, you’ll find that you can’t do anything with the device other than have it continuously play music, without volume controls or interruption, unless of course of you turn it off. Surprise: the only third-party headphones that will work are ones that haven’t even entered manufacturing yet, because they’ll need to contain yet another new Apple authentication chip, which will add to their price.

The EFF remarked on how little this had been covered by other reviewers:

One final thought: why have so many of the reviews of iPods failed to notice the proliferation of these Apple “authentication chips”? If it were Microsoft demanding that computer peripherals all include Microsoft “authentication chips” in order to work with Windows (or Toyota or Ford doing the same for replacement parts), I’d think reviewers would be screaming about it.

Yes, and rightfully so. Granted, Apple’s pulled shenanigans like this before, but having one pair of headphones just for your iPod Shuffle and one pair for everything else is ridiculous. Maybe people are becoming accustomed to being treated like crap by Apple. That’s a dangerous thought in and of itself.

• iLounge review pointing out the DRM (first paragraph after the second picture)
• EFF Commentary on the DRM

Gears of War - Credit: Gears of War

A defect in the DRM on Gears of War has made the game unplayable as of the 28th.

Gamers who tried to play Gears of War on the PC Thursday ran into a slight snag: it seems that the digital certificate that allows the game to run expired on January 28, 2009. Basically that means if you keep your PC’s clock up to date, you can no longer play the game. The official Epic forum is ablaze with complaints about this issue, as the still-kicking community becomes enraged.

…

Did Epic assume no one would be playing the title once 2009 came around? It’s hard to understand why there would be an end-date hard-coded into the title’s DRM, especially one that came less than three years after the game was released. Many PC gamers are leery of any kind of DRM that must dial into a central server to authenticate, wondering what happens if those servers are shut down. Now we know—in this case, the game shipped with DRM that was essentially counting down until the game would cease to work.

While it’s not rare for games to ship with bugs every now and again, it’s pretty shocking when one ships with an issue that causes the title to stop working for everyone who paid. Those who pirated the game, as usual, continue to play with no issues.

Ha, funny. (That’s what you get for buying proprietary games.)

• Ars Technica

Man Controlling Trade - Credit: kubina (CC BY SA)

After DRM problems in the gaming industry, the FTC plans to discuss DRM and consider what can be done to improve the situation.

The official page describes the meeting and its aim. “Digital rights management (DRM) refers to technologies typically used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, and copyright holders to attempt to control how consumers access and use media and entertainment content,” the FTC explains. “Among other issues, the workshop will address the need to improve disclosures to consumers about DRM limitations.”

The agenda includes demonstrations of DRM-related technology, panel discussions about how these technologies affect consumers, legal issues surrounding DRM, and discussions on the potential need for government involvement to protect consumers.

The companies should be able to do what they want.  The only thing I could see happening is them being mandated to put some big ugly Surgeon General’s Warning on the front.  “DRM may prevent you from playing this game if you are pregnant or nursing.”

• Ars Technica
• FTC

Protest - Credit: bcatch on Flickr (CC BY-SA)

iTunes has dropped DRM, and is allowing artists/labels to customize pricing.

The deal means that iTunes immediately has 8 million DRM-free songs available and will have a total of 10 million by April, as contracts with indie bands and labels are renewed.

“It’s definitely a step in the right direction,” said Jason Barry, a Los Angeles resident attending the conference. “DRM is the reason piracy is very popular, because people want to own the music they buy.”

Like the DRM-free music already in the iTunes Plus store from EMI and other labels, the digital catalogs of Sony Music, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group (indie labels to follow in April) will be encoded at a higher level than their DRMed counterparts: 256 Kbps. Those who purchased DRM-ed songs from iTunes will be able to upgrade them to the DRM-free, better-sounding versions for 30 cents a song.

For real this time.  Now we have to get them using OGG and FLAC.  Once again, sorry for all the lateness.  After-holiday slump.

• Wired

DRM - Credit: jbonnain on Flickr (CC BY)

A rumor has spread that iTunes will be removing all DRM in its store at a global level tomorrow.

AppleInsider cites a Dec. 3 story from the French publication Electron Libre that says iTunes will remove DRM from Sony BMG, Universal and Warner tracks on December 9th, like it already does with EMI and indie content. The story doesn’t say what percentage of tracks from the major labels, or what the cost bump for the new tracks might be, if any, though it seems to say the thing might cover every single album and track on iTunes. In fact, check out this rather ungraceful machine translation of the French story for yourself:

…The signals are clear today. iTunes should offer catalogs of three majors Universal Music, SonyBMG Music and Waner [sic] rid of technological protection measures next Tuesday, Dec. 9. The transition to DRM Free should be at a global level…

I guess we’ll see tomorrow.

• Gizmodo

Valve - Credit: valvesoftware.com

Video game maker Valve decries DRM as redundant and devaluing.

Valve is a wonderfully open company—in many cases, direct questions sent to the publisher will be answered by a member of the creative team within hours. One gamer recently e-mailed Valve and asked why he saw EA’s logo on a commercial for Left 4 Dead: he bought the game via Steam but didn’t want to support EA after the Spore DRM debacle. He got a reply from a managing director at the company, Gabe Newell, that was to the point: EA only handles distribution for the physical product, and Valve thinks most DRM is “just dumb.”

Newell doesn’t have kind words for the use of digital rights managements. “As far as DRM goes, most DRM strategies are just dumb. The goal should be to create greater value for customers through service value… not by decreasing the value of a product.”

• Ars Technica

Blu-ray - Credit: pitzyper on Flickr (CC BY)

BD+, the Blu-ray copy protection system has been broken by a group of doom9 researchers.

I am glad to announce the first successful restoration of the BD+ protected movie “The Day After Tomorrow” in linux. It was done using a blue ray drive with patched firmware (to get the volume id), DumpHD to decrypt the contents according to the AACS specification and the BDVM debugger from this thread to generate the conversion table. The conversion table is the key information to successfully repair all the broken parts in m2ts files to restore the original video content. This small tool was finally used to repair the main movie file “00001.m2ts” according to the conversion table. ~Oopho2ei

Haha, take that DRM.

• Doom9 Forum
• Slashdot

DRM - Credit: jbonnain on Flickr (CC BY)

Today is the 10th anniversary of the DMCA.

Today is the tenth anniversary of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), signed into law by President Bill Clinton on October 28, 1998. EFF is marking the occasion with the release of a 19-page report that focuses on the most notorious part of the law: the ban on “circumventing” digital rights management (DRM) and other “technological protection measures.” The report, entitled Unintended Consequences: Ten Years Under the DMCA, collects reported cases where the DMCA was used not against copyright infringers, but instead against consumers, scientists and legitimate competitors.

The collected stories are like a trip down memory lane for those who have followed digital freedom issues over the past decade. Here are a few examples of DMCA abuse in the report that you might remember:

• In 1999, Sony sues Connectix over the Virtual Game Station, which let you play your legit Playstation games on your Macintosh.
• In 2001, the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) threatens Princeton Professor Ed Felten’s research team over disclosure of vulnerabilities in audio watermarking technology.
• In 2001, Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov is arrested after speaking at Defcon, accused of building software for his employer, ElcomSoft, that converted Adobe e-books to PDF.
• In 2002, Blizzard sues a group of hobbyist open source developers over bnetd, server software that allows people to play Blizzard games against each other over the Internet.
• In 2003, Lexmark uses the DMCA to block distribution of chips that allow refilling of laser toner cartridges.
• In 2004, Hollywood succeeds in shutting down 321 Studios’ DVD X Copy software, which allowed people to make backup copies of their own DVDs.
• In 2006, computer security researchers at Princeton delay disclosure of the Sony-BMG “rootkit” based on fears of DMCA liability.
• In 2008, Hollywood targets Real Networks over RealDVD, software that allows you to copy DVDs to a hard drive for later viewing.

Happy birthday DMCA.  You have made our lives much more interesting.

• EFF

Walmart

Walmart has stated that they will continue maintaining their DRM servers for now.

The decision comes only a couple of weeks after Wal-Mart originally announced that it planned to turn off the servers, and only a day after the servers were scheduled to be pulled offline. Wal-Mart had fully transitioned away from DRM in February of this year, meaning that its previously-DRMed music was no longer important to the company. Customers, if they had purchased the copy-protected WMA files, would no longer be able to authorize new computers or operating systems to play the music once the servers went offline.

If this all sounds familiar as a pop song, it should. Both Yahoo Music and MSN Music have tried to pull the same stunt, almost leaving old customers out in the cold after the companies moved on to greener pastures. However, both decided later to help out their customers—MSN decided to leave its DRM key servers up until 2011, and Yahoo gave coupons to its music captives so that they could re-purchase their music, DRM-free, through Rhapsody.

So they can’t do this forever.  I’m not sure what they plan on doing.  Wait until people don’t care about their collection of music from the 2ks anymore?

• Ars Technica
• The Consumerist
• Gizmodo
• Boing Boing
• BetaNews
• Slashdot