A rant on proprietary media

Perhaps I should point out that I get a lot of pleasure from playing with new digital technologies, and how kickass cool the whole lot generally is. Today I was going through a old backup CD, looking at old photos and catching a little nostaligia, I came across some .wma's of a friend's band I'd copied some CDs for back in South Africa. They only made a few tracks before the band broke up, I thought they were good.

Now normally I know better than to make .wmas (windows media audio files) but for reasons pressing at the time I'd had to use a crappy beta of WMP9 that had compulsory DRM in it. I still have my copy of their CD somewhere, but rather than dig it out I thought I'd queue up the sound files.

No dice. Files wouldn't play in Winamp or w32-mplayer, which Microsoft graciou$ly allows to play .wma files. So I grudgingly load up WMP to see if that can play the things. WMP tells me I need a liscence (from microsoft) to play these files. Now I'm quite sure the band never gave microsoft or anyone else the right to issue liscences for their stuff. But I go to the MS liscencing site and get a liscence for each of the 3 tracks, which are issued with a smug message about how great DRM is and the veiled threat that it might not be free next time.

And I had to use microsoft software to get this liscence. And somehow this software is paid for, and the liscencing servers are supported, and the bandwidth is paid for. And the lawyers fees are met. And lots and lots of expensive ads come out for this liscencing stuff. Wonder who pays for all this stuff? Guess.

Maybe I shouldn't take it personally when big corporations try to extort money from me. And maybe I shouldn't hate the RIAA for doing what they do. They naturally assume I owe them money because I enjoy music, like that Osama Bin Ladin fellow probably wants me dead as an infidel. It's just the way things are. Heck, if I was more enthusiastic about trying to extort money from people I might have a lot more of it, but I've turned out a lot less mercenary than I thought I was. Paint a red star on me and hang me as a communist.

Created 2004-05-15 00:00:00 by 149 and filed under introspection