Wednesday 17 January 2007

And Another Thing: Music Industry Rant Part Deux

Got all riled up after writing that posting on the music industry. After talking with Fonzie and Leslie yesterday, they both separately had the same conversation with me about how no one makes it easy for us to BUY media.

Case and point my daughter’s video ipod. One of the reasons I bought it for her was that she flies in-between Greece and Canada at least three times a year (cross-continental divorced parents). She has been doing this since she was 8 and her only beef (well not her only beef) is the plane ride. So I thought getting the video ipod and putting her favorite movies would help the process. So first off, I go to the Canadian iTunes store. Wow. You can see our movie options.


Pixar short films

Let's go to the iTunes US store and see if I can shop their instead. Good actually have more than one option. Ok so let me go and buy something.....WAIT! Canadians can't buy from the US store.

At this point I have two options. Either send her home on the plane with no videos on her video ipod and her belief that the present was stupid. OR download a program that will rip her DVDs (that we already bought) and turn them into MP3 video to use on her ipod.

So i tried to do it the right way, and found nothing but problems. It's part of the DNA of the network, if you create obstructions, it goes around them.

1 comments:

Mark Federman said...

You've identified the essence of Cory Doctorow's argument against DRM (and against the entertainment industry). In attempting to protect their products against either so-called piracy or region-licensing protectionism, they end up making it so inconvenient for honest folk that those who would otherwise be willing to given them money are moved to find other, usually free, alternatives. Once bitten, twice shy.

BTW, in Canada, it is still technically legal to shift legitimately acquired content from one medium to another, rather than having to buy the content multiple times. I say "still," since the pending amendments to the Copyright Act about to be introduced by the Harper government will make it illegal to, say, rip a CD that you own onto your MP3 player.

 
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