Anyone who wants a good look at the text overlay that flashes before the break can find a still here:

http://www.thatsplenty.com/images/textoverlay.jpg

C'mon, thingamadad. That's like blaming the users who bought Sony CDs for installing rootkits on their machines.

When the major record labels (finally) started selling music online, it all had DRM, which was never openly discussed, and it took a while for the public to find out what it was and what it does, and now that the portion of the public who buys digital downloads knows about DRM, it's going away.

Again, how can you possibly blame the consumers for not initially shunning an embedded technology that wasn't openly disclosed by the sellers and about which there was little or no public awareness because it was so new?

Well, frankly, it's not the same thing at all. Now, if every car on the market was a gas-guzzler but it was impossible to find out any car's MPG (or the MPG was buried somewhere in the five-page buyer's contract, which, again, is a weak analogy because people spending $30k are a lot more likely to read a five page contract than someone spending $0.99, but anyway), so right nobody knew the horrible, horrible MPG until the first time the buyer brought the thing to the pump, then we might have a good analogy here.

When the major record companies started selling music on the internet, it ALL had DRM. There wasn't a choice, the only choice was not to buy, and many people did, in fact, choose not to buy. Which is why the DRM stores are closing and now, finally, all of the major record labels are selling drm-free media in some way or another.

I think the problem I'm grinding up against with your argument is that, in my opinion, you seem to be saying "x exists in the marketplace, therefore people want and will pay for x. Therefore, it is our (collective) fault that x exists." And I'm saying that "x can exist in the marketplace even if no one wants it, though it will, in the long run, be doomed to failure."

Another issue that complicates the argument is that x (in our case, DRM) isn't even really a product. The music is the product, and people love music. DRM is something that has been tacked on to the product to restrict a user's ability to do things with the product.

If all gun manufacturers, sick of all the bad press they've gotten over the years, simultaneously banded together and exclusively released guns that would not fire at any living creature, but didn't tell anyone the guns would work this way, then we'd have a good analogy.

How could you say, in that case "Well, they're making the guns like that so clearly it's the market's fault!"

But I think you and I agree on the outcome - once everyone realizes that the restrictions have effectively broken the product (the music or the gun), the purchases drop to almost zero and the companies have to change tactics or die. Which is exactly what has been happening with DRM.

As for the pervasive DRM'd portable digital music players on the market, if you're talking about the Zune and the iPod, that's, in my opinion, a weak analogy too. For the analogy to work you'd have to assume that the Hummer could take two kinds of gas: gas that gives it 12 mpg (or whatever), and gas that gives it 60 mpg.

If there are any digital players that play DRM'd content strictly, I've never heard of them. And there's a good reason for that: way too many people already have tons of MP3s. Nobody would want a product that would reject all the content all these people already own.

But, finally, I agree with you. Once the consumer base is educated on what DRM is and what it does, it doesn't have a chance in hell of going anywhere.

I'm going to have to disagree with you, Thingamadad. The customers never made DRM possible, the customers never asked for it, never directly or via market forces informed the record companies that they were ready to buy crippled content. In fact, I think it's quite easy to prove the opposite, that the content providers saw a clear demand for online content distribution through the popularity of programs like napster and edonkey, fought court battles to try and make it go away, and when they finally showed up to participate in the internet marketplace, they, the companies insisted on DRM, not the other way around. It has been constant pressure (and lack of purchases) from the customers that have made dismantling DRM successful while making DRM-locked content providers fail (like the Sony Connect store).

Further, while the facts of DRM may or may not have been buried in the EULA for these 'services'(don't know, don't read them), DRM was certainly never a selling point and until major media campaigns by groups like Defective by Design, when average users (you know, the OTHER 70% of the US population) bumped up against the constraints of DRM, they thought they hit a bug or something. DRM isn't advertised or discussed on the selling pages of these sites because it is inherently undesirable to end users.

And I do think the word "punishing" is appropriate here. Anyone who has been following the story of content distribution in the internet age knows that the big media companies want to get paid for their products, products which are increasingly easy to get at very high qualities for free. I think that when people pay for content they want and enjoy they are doing the right thing. When these same companies then fail or do worse-than-expected with DRM-locked content and close shop, without unlocking or providing some other means of "freeing up" the content to be used in the future with other devices or platforms by the people who have bought and paid for them, I believe the companies really are punishing their best customers - those that will pay for music and movies even when they are available free on the internet - for their own technological shortsightedness.

Please fix the update.

I am also a video professional and can confirm that whatever the wisdom of this trick might be, the video is not a trick of compositing and anyone who thinks it is doesn't know what they're talking about.

Thank you.

I smell a fake. I've seen sever Advertorials, plus I work in video production. This was a zero budget crapfest with an amateur editor and a mediocre camera.

While it wouldn't surprise me in the least to discover that the RIAA were sending out fake news to plug their agenda, it would surprise me to find out they were sending this.

It'd surprise me even more to find out that someone paid for this.

So I say:

FAKE!