Danish ISP Latest To Offer Crippled DRM-Infested Music Subscription Service

from the read-the-fine-print dept

Tue, Apr 1st 2008 12:48pm — Mike Masnick

While the press is reporting that TDC, Denmark's largest ISP, is now offering free music downloads at no additional charge, the fine print leaves much to be desired. It turned out (not surprisingly) that these "free downloads" are DRM-infested and will stop working if you leave TDC. That would suggest that they can't be transferred to certain devices (such as iPods) and users will have no ability to promote songs by sharing them with friends. Also, there's a rather limited song selection. While three of the major labels have signed up, there are only one million songs -- or less than 17% of the songs found on iTunes. It makes for a nice headline, but it's difficult to see this getting very far.

Filed Under: denmark, drm, free, music, subscription
Companies: tdc

7 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 1 Apr 2008 @ 1:16pm

So easy to find flaws, but so hard to come up with good solutions.
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Matt, 1 Apr 2008 @ 1:31pm

Re: thats what happens when ya don't put in effort
Yep AC, thats what happens when you put people in a legal department together to come up with a technical solution.
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Haywood, 1 Apr 2008 @ 1:32pm

Re: So easy to find flaws
Here's a solution; record it through the analog hole, and do with it whatever you want.
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Bobbknight, 1 Apr 2008 @ 2:32pm

Walla
Line out, line in to Audacity and Lame no DRM.
Play on your MP3 player at will.
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mike allen, 1 Apr 2008 @ 2:47pm

should
could also work by switching your audacity to sterio mix and recording of anologue without using two machines also CDex to record from anologue output (in tools if you didnt know) play back original DRM infested track on player of your choice (not audacity or CDex.)
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Haywood, 1 Apr 2008 @ 3:23pm

Re: should
Or just use Magix and record "what you hear"
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Anonymous Coward, 2 Apr 2008 @ 5:42am

Re:
The solution is ever so simple.

Take the speaker wires (which is an analog output) of the device into which the music will play and use them as the microphone input (which is an analog input), reformat and re balance and rerecord in digital format.

With some 70 to 80% of US homes having the basic equipment to do this or the majority of the equipment and the rest available at the local Radio Shack there is no shortage of means to accomplish stripping all forms of DRM off of any and all sound tracks.

For video the issue is slightly more complicated but with the conversion boxes now fully available to convert digital TV signals to analog signals (which the government will give you a $40.00 coupon to purchase) the solution is almost equally as simple.

The neat thing about this solution is that the only DRM that will prevent this also makes the digital content useless to everybody which of course makes the content completely worthless.
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