With Nude Media, All You Hold is But A Cache of What You Own

That’s the crucial fork between my view of digital media and the more traditional one (wherein MP3s, for example, replace vinyl as object in one’s possession). If your local copies are simply expedient cacheings of that to which what you’ve purchased rights, then restrictions on formats, limited freedoms of transcoding, and the other restrictions that are currently being wrapped into DRM, are obviously inappropriate, arbitrary restrictions the only benefit of which is to support particular business models. This isn’t new news. But…

Putting Digital Music to Rights

Music, through the imminent DRM format wars, will become increasingly ghettoised through branded delivery mechanisms — already iTunes and Sony software insist on transcoding from one expedient but lossy format to another if you want to play tracks on competing players. And there seems to be a lot of pressure from all involved to pass off such low-quality formats as worthy of purchase and collection, presumably to create a profitable market of low-res, ‘throw-away’ copy-protected music, and to encourage ongoing waves of repurchase as listeners demand better quality or support of later playback technologies. I think these effects result from …