The Free Software Foundation has created a campaign in an effort to eliminate digital rights management (DRM) and embrace DRM-free media. “While DRM has largely been defeated in downloaded music, it is a growing problem in the area of eBooks, where people have had their books restricted so they can’t freely loan, re-sell or donate them, read them without being tracked, or move them to a new device without re-purchasing all of them,” the campaign’s website reads. “They’ve ev...

Google announced and launched its Music Beta service on Tuesday, and record execs aren’t too pleased with its decision to move ahead before reaching a deal. “People are pissed,” one record label exec told Hollywood Reporter, which explained in one article why it took so long for Google and the music industry to reach an agreement. Reportedly, Google offered some labels larger advances than others, which resulted in some firms holding out for more money. Similarly, the music industry is conce...

Reuters is reporting that mobile giant Nokia will stop offering its free music downloads service — Ovi Music — to new handset purchasers. The service, which initially launched in 2008, has received a luke warm reception due to the restrictive DRM used by Nokia, more competitive music service options, and lack of carrier support. Customers who currently have a free music subscription will be able to use the service until their subscription runs out. Universal, EMI, Warner, and Sony had partnere...

The digital rights management (DRM) security used by Microsoft to protect apps in its Windows Phone 7 Marketplace has been cracked, enthusiast blog WPCentral reports. Though the technology needed to do so is not yet in the hands of the general public, the DRM protecting paid applications can now easily be stripped off of apps. If details of the vulnerability used to achieve the DRM crack are made available to the public, unscrupulous programers could use the exploit to develop software that allows users to st...

The ever-popular streaming movie service is coming to Android. In a post on the company’s official blog, Netflix announced that they will start to appear on “select Android devices” in early 2011. The reason why Netflix for Android won’t immediately be available on every Android handset is due to a “lack of a generic and complete platform security and content protection mechanism for Android.” There seems to be a DRM issue with making Netflix’s content providers happy...

It’s starting to look like VLC’s days in the iOS app store are numbered. Videolan developer, Rémi Denis-Courmont, has confirmed that the company has sent Apple papers citing copyright infringement. The VLC media player is currently distributed under a General Public License (GPL), and this has come into direct conflict with Apple’s DRM-based app store distribution model. The conflict of licenses were known to both parties prior to the app’s publication, and Videolan is stressing they ...

Oh DRM, how we love thee. Valve, the company responsible for the lifestyle game Modern Warfare 2, recently issued an apology to over 12,000 legitimate MW2 users who were accidentally banned from getting their first-person shooter on by the company’s DRM implementation. Valve’s president, Gabe Newell, wrote an email stating the the snafu occurred when an issue  with “a signature check between the disk version of a DLL and a latent memory version” occurred. We’re just g...

After weeks of leaks and speculation, Canada’s reigning Conservative government outlined its plans to amend the ageing Copyright Act. According to the outline, anyone convicted of bypassing the DRM of a given media format — even if legally purchased — will be subject to a fine of up to $5,000. But if the circumvention of DRM is done for profit, then the fine is raised to $1 million. Convicted downloaders of copyrighted materials will face significantly weaker penalties with a fine of $5,000,...

Some pretty big news out of China recently as Nokia has announced the launch of its Comes With Music service in the world’s second largest consumer market. To be known locally as Yue Sui Xiang and included for free with the purchase of select Nokia handsets (in China’s case, the X6 16GB, X6 32GB, 5230, 5330, 5800w, 6700s, E52 and E72i), the service allows for the downloading of an unlimited amount of à la carte tracks over a period of 12 to 24 months. Even better, all of the music — which ...

Computer World is reporting that Apple Inc. will offer its own brand of digital rights management (DRM) software to iPad ebook publishers to protect their digital books on the iPad; this is in lieu of the DRM system setup by Adobe. The Adobe DRM schema — although not the standard — would allow users, as Nick Bogaty, senior business development manager at Adobe, put it to, “use any e-reader they want, and purchase from any point of sale that uses [Adobe's] Content Server.” The move is f...

Nothing makes you feel like you truly own your media and content like being able to do almost whatever you want with it. We’re already used to DRM for our MP3s and the limitations it puts on device selection and sharing, but the idea that the same kind of protection would be put on our books was a head-scratcher. For books on the Kindle, it works just that way. You can’t go putting your content on any device you want, whenever you want to — until now. An Israeli hacker has managed to break t...

Things like this happen in three stages: 1) You find out it’s going to happen. 2) You curse Apple. 3) You accept the fact that Apple is king when it comes to making money and cough up the extra cash. Masked as part of a trade off with major labels to facilitate DRM-free iTunes tracks, Apple announced back in January that it would introduce a new variable pricing structure where tracks would be $0.69, $0.99 or $1.29 depending on popularity. Today, the new tiered pricing has gone live. As you can see abov...

The folks over at iLounge stumbled upon some curious info regarding the new iPod Shuffle that has us scratching our heads. We all know the controls for the new Shuffle are on the headphones, but apparently Cupertino decided to make it even more difficult for headphone makers to get in on some Shuffle action. Control of playback and adjustment of volume will not be permitted unless the headphones used are equipped with an Apple authentication chip. D’oh! To further complicate matters, headphones with thi...

When Apple annouced that iTunes users now had its consent to free their iTunes-purchased music from the hellish enslavement of DRM, people across the world rejoiced. That is until they tried to remove the DRM themselves. Users in Canada (amongst other nations) are reporting that iTunes is refusing to allow them to convert their protected files into .DRM-free MP3 files for use on devices that don’t bear the Apple logo. Was Apple only intending for this service to come to the US due to legal issues? Hopef...