I think somewhere in that statement is the answer to this conundrum, but I have yet to quite figure out what that would mean. in any case the implication is: mp3 are not goods to be sold, but a way to find musicians you like.

again, I don’t quite know what the financial model would be that comes out of that, but it’s radically different from how the RIAA would like it to work.

@dan: i agree; DRM just has to be hard enough to thwart people like me, and it’s successful. (though I am on the outer edge because if there is free software that’ll crack DRM, I’ll likely find it…).

So yes, it can always be defeated, but that doesn’t matter. Just being a large inconvenience is sufficient.

It’s pure logic. At the simplest level if you can hear it you can make a recording using a device completely seperate from Operating Whatnots, Trusted Computing Thingamagigs, etc. No amount of crypto will break a patch cable soldered into the input to a speaker cone.

Not that it has to. I’ve been asked to break DRM schemes professionally, and it’s always absurdly easy. We’ve seen this time and time again in DRM implementations on devices like the PSP and XBOX. DRM is predicated on getting everything right, but the hacker only needs to fidn one small error in the implementation to bypass the scheme. In practice this is an error that allows an arbitrary byte to be written to an arbitrary memory address.

The deeper point is that the notion of scarcity is gone in the modern digital world. Music, video, software, there’s really nothing preventing these things from being given to anyone who wants them. Effectively the copying is free, and distribution is vanishingly close to the same.

However the owner of a work has to be able to dictate the terms by which that work can be used. Most of us like copyright when it works in our favor, but become instant hypocrites when we want to hear the latest derivative bunk from the RIAA or see the latest escapade of someone who’s famous solely for being famous.

The answer, I think, is to find a new resting point between supply (near infinte) and demand (finite). We don’t want artists to starve, but we object to still paying the breakage fee for LPs that was carried over to the new CD format by our good friends at the labels. It’s a tempest in a tea-cup that amounts to the industry powers that be not wanting to reduce their margins in return for a larger audience.

The same thing can be done with audio, by requiring you purchase “HDCP for audio”-supported speakers (I don’t know the name of the tech for audio). At the OS level it can be done with drivers that use encryption on the input and the output. Hackers will probably be one step ahead of this but it will be tougher than it is now.

In each case, your only solution will be to record content with a video camera or a microphone.

Again, my point is that the technology to do this already exists, they just haven’t been able to “sell” us on it yet. Let’s keep on preventing that from happening :)