Life in the Network

Oh boy! This is great timing. I've recently had some unpleasant experiences with downloaded music. For my birthday last month, my wife bought me a Sansa (Sandisk) media player. Previously, I had a Memorex mp3 player that was the cheapest, most basic mp3 player that Target had to offer. It only had 256 megabytes of memory, but it was nice to have, especially when flying. A couple of years ago, I needed something to help me escape during a flight to Europe. There's nothing like flying eight hours in the coach section. With the old Memorex mp3 player, I usually just loaded music files that I had "ripped" off of my own compact discs. At the time, I didn't feel the need to download music.

I was excited to get the new player because it was such a technological improvement over the old one. This new player has much more memory, I believe that I can load around 230 songs onto it as compared to the paltry 20 song capacity of the older player. It even has a fairly high definition display screen that I can use to view stored pictures and video. It's fun! The only problem that I have had during the time with my new toy was when I decided to try out the Rhapsody music offer that was included with the purchase of the player.

I decided to sign up with Rhapsody because I was excited about the prospect of downloading specific songs instead of having to buy a whole album. I found that the Rhapsody program was a tad temperamental. While trying to learn how this whole deal worked, I ran into problems that forced me to restart the program. Sometimes I even had to restart the whole computer.

Then there's the whole "syncing" function that THREE programs would try to perform after I plugged in the player. Since neither Sandisk nor Rhapsody saw it necessary to provide me with any coherent instructions, I had to call various companies and use my "techy sense" to figure it out. Then just recently, my player started insisting that I hook it back up to the computer (and Rhapsody) so the licenses for the downloaded songs could be reauthorized.

This simply made me angry. I (again) had to mess around with the Rhapsody program for an hour. I'm a little insulted by this. I paid for the damn songs and I'd like to be able to use them without having to deal with this stupid DRM (digital rights management) feature on the music files. What if this happens while I'm away from home? I wouldn't be able to refresh the DRM license until I returned home. That's terrible!

I have enough things to worry about and keep track of as it is. If I'm paying 99 cents per song, which is similar to the price per song on a store bought music CD, why do I have to deal with the DRM software tag on the downloaded song?? Am I not able to put the songs from the store bought CD onto my computer's hard drive and burn as many copies as I want? I think that the use of the DRMs is a tactic meant to simply improve the chances of the songs being lost over time.

The music files from Rhapsody aren't even a common music format. It's Rhapsody's own software. I called Rhapsody and asked them if there was any way to convert these files to an mp3 format. They told me that the only way to convert the files was to burn the files onto a compact disc. So I gave it a shot, and for some reason the piece of junk Rhapsody program wouldn't work. It kept instructing me to put a blank CD in the drive. I tried different discs but it still would not work.

I think that the entertainment industry is yet again crying that "the sky is falling." As John Barlow pointed out, people like Jack Valenti thought that the introduction of VCRs to the world would "...kill the film industry." It in fact did not and has made the film industry a lot of money over the years. There are countless occurrences throughout history that mirror Valenti's assertions. When the mainstream internet came into existence, people cried that it would mean the end of the newspaper. They feared that newspaper sales would plunge if people were able to get the news from their computers. This of course did not happen. You would think that people would have learned by now.

Regarding Tom Spring's article, I found a flaw in Jack Valenti's argument. Spring asked Valenti "Why can't people who legally purchase DVDs make one backup copy? How come the same fair use rights that let you make a backup copy of other media do not extend to DVDs?" Valenti skirted this question and instead said "Do you know anything else in the country that if something is abused for any reason they'll give you a backup? If I go down to the hardware store and buy an electric lawn mower and I take it home, and three weeks later my wife runs over it in the driveway, I can't take it back and get a new one. I can't get a backup."

Springs asked Valenti about being able to make a copy of the purchased product, not about getting a free replacement after that product gets damaged. In actuality, though impracticable, a person could make an exact copy of their lawnmower if they wanted to. It would only be illegal if that person then tried to sell the lawn mower. (I think that's correct. Any lawyers out there feel free to chime in.)

Though I am not for total informational anarchy, I found the following assertion from John Perry Barlow to be very interesting. He states that, “...after giving up on copy protection, the software industry expected that widespread piracy would surely occur. And it did. Even so, the software industry is booming."

So come on you stingy music industry people, give it a chance!