Sunday, October 15, 2006

Thingz of free trials & copyrighted material

So I'm sitting here pondering a strangism...And it's merely from an observation & not my actual doing such things. And the strange is about free trial services that allow one to enjoy fully copyrighted material for a limited time. And hence one can use various methods available to clone such copyrighted materials to keep & enjoy for however long one wants to. Examples are things like Netflix, Blockbuster online rentals, or Rhapsody where they usually offer you free trials for about two weeks & then you cancel & then they say "Well hey we want ya so we'll extend your trial for 2 more weeks." And then you cancel & then you sign up again for a free trial using a different shipping address such as your place of employment along with a different email address & then you can enjoy more free for another month. In the case of the online music service such as Rhapsody, you can listen to entire songs & albums during the trial period & not pay a dime. And there's myriads of free or almost free software programs that will happily capture the audio from you computer's sound card. Or you could simply run the line out of the computer into some of kind external audio recorder. In the case of protected audio that you purchase from Rhapsody or iTunes, you get this nice protected file that you can have burned onto a CD. And then you use a free or almost free tool that copies the audio content from the CD byte by byte to create a perfect audio file. Then you can use converters to convert the audio to .mp3. And then you can, if you wanted, just send that audio file all about the world. I laugh to think about how iTunes has been disabled for parts of the world due to people doing that. The only thing that prevents people from such sharing of things is a little license agreement that you click a nice button on the computer screen and then it's up to your morals & values to keep you from 'stealing.' I'm sure publishers just love that.

I just find it ironic to think about the paradigm of digital media rights & how the publishers of such media are trying to protect that which they publish. But the very thing they are trying to protect can be so easily obtained for free & converted into an unprotected format.

But then the same was probably true way back when one could record their music onto an audio tape & then pass the tapes around to people. I'm sure the music industry went nuts about that.

The publishing realm is strange. If you leave it up to consumers to abide by a legal speal that they either click on in the computer realm or read on the back of some media disc, tape, or album, then stuff is going to be cloned & passed about.

Until later comes, turn it up to free.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hollywood fought long and hard to prevent Sony's Betamax technology from reaching the consumer. Hollywood lost.

It's legal for a gun manufacturer to sell guns. It's not legal for a gun owner to shoot someone. A similar principal applies to recording devices. You, the consumer, can purchase one and use it for private non-commercial use. But you can be taken to court if you violate the license agreement.