I have a small, tiny, infinitesimal ‘thing’ about something called Digital Rights Management (DRM). DRM is the un-lubed finger slipped past the sphincters of unsuspecting consumer primarily by the music and movie industries. Officially, DRM allows copyright holders to fight unauthorized copying of their digital content. Before this was an issue, copyright holders had some protections, but so did consumers. If I went to Sam Goody (anyone remember Sam Goody?) and bought a Suicidal Tendencies CD, I was not allowed to make copies for my friends. Conversely, say my car only had a cassette player. Thanks to fair use laws, I was allowed to copy my CD to a blank cassette so I could listen to Mike Muir screaming his heart out in my car or Walkman (anyone remember the Walkman?). Officially, DRM was only to be a means of extending this copyright protection to digital media like movies and music.

In reality, DRM completely controls how you consume the digital content you have bought. DRM is why, until recently, music purchased on iTunes would only play on iPods. DRM is why Coldplay’s X&Y CD might not play on Mac computers. DRM is why former customers of Microsoft’s MSN Music are pretty much hosed unless something is done in Redmond to help them out.

Awhile back, after releasing the Zune, Microsoft shut down the MSN Music store in favor of the Zune Marketplace. Recently, the decision was made to shut down the servers in charge of keeping track of licenses and system authorizations. MSN Music worked much like iTunes does today: you buy DRM’d music through an account. You can authorize up to 5 computers on your account that can have this licensed music. You can add or remove computers as needed. With these servers shut down, users can no longer add or remove authorized systems. Effectively, these users have three choices:

• Burn the purchased songs to a CD and rip the CD to MP3. The mp3s will not have any DRM, however this is will result in a serious loss in audio quality.
• Keep the music on the same system(s) and never get rid of it and never have to reinstall or upgrade the operating system. Ever. Once a system is authorized, it can play all your MSN Music purchases. OS upgrades can require re-authorization. How realistic is this?
• Buy new copies of the music. Because it’s not like you’ve already purchased the music. Seriously. You haven’t. I’m not making this up. The music industry and RIAA see purchasing music as paying for the right to listen to it. You don’t own the music, just the right have a copy of it and listen to it within their limitations. Once these servers are shut down in September, your rights as they apply to MSN Music files are forever locked. I guess this is what they deem as “fair use” nowadays.

Now, a simple solution to this would have Microsoft ask all former MSN Music subscribers to contact them with account information & a list of songs they purchased. Microsoft should be able to verify these lists and offer credits for each song either in the Zune Marketplace or with some third-party vendor like amazon.com. Whether this happens or not remains to be seen, but the premise is still there. This little episode highlights probably the main reason DRM is bad for consumers – it has the ability to strip them of their rights.

If you’re interested in DRM-free music, iTunes has iTunes Plus. Also, amazon.com recently opened their mp3 store with prices equal to iTunes, support from all 4 major labels and no DRM to be found. I’m sure there are other legal sources, this is just what I know of.

Awhile back, I worked in Fredericksburg, VA for the local paper. One of the first people I met there was Clay Jones, the editorial cartoonist. Through the years, we’ve kept in contact, and I follow his cartoon online. Sunday’s cartoon cracked me up if only for the drunken tree sloth:

It’s only $11. I don’t know if I would wear it, though. Still, pretty funny concept:

Handy info to have nonetheless. Here if you wanna buy it.

I just bought two shirts for myself. The second one would make be perfect for a certain little boy I know whose first birthday is coming up…

I’ve heard all the news about how most Republicans don’t like McCain despite the fact that they all love him now because he’s going to be the nominee unless Cheney & Rove can figure out a way to stop that from happening. I’m kind of hot and cold on the guy. I like the fact that he’s not beholden to party politics. I like that he’s a moderate conservative because, in some respects, I am one as well. Every now and then, he says something that just kills it for me. Like the ‘hundred years in Iraq’ comment. I know what he meant, and I still don’t like it.

One thing I’ve noticed about McCain’s public speaking is that he always seems so calm. Not real calmness; when he’s debating someone he disagrees with it’s like every sentence is preceded by an imperceptible deep breath. I get the feeling there’s anger under there, intense anger. I don’t know if it’s the look on his face, tone of his voice or what. It’s something in his overall demeanor that makes me think he would just assume throw something large and heavy and massive-head-wound-inducing, but instead he swallows it and talks in much the same voice teacher or parent might use with a mid-tantrum child who won’t listen to anything rather than throwing something large and heavy and massive-head-wound-, long-prison-sentence- as well as cocktail-party-punchline-inducing. As I found on Wonkette today, I may not be alone:

• McCain “often insults people and flies off the handle,” the New York Times reported.
• The Arizona Republic was writing about his “volcanic temper” the last time he ran for president, in 1896 1999.
• His former colleague in the Senate, Republican Bob Smith, says McCain is a nutter: “I have witnessed incidents where he has used profanity at colleagues and exploded at colleagues … He would disagree about something and then explode. It was incidents of irrational behavior. We’ve all had incidents where we have gotten angry, but I’ve never seen anyone act like that.”
• Former Congressman John LeBoutillier, another Republican, says this: “I think he is mentally unstable and not fit to be president.”
• Basically everyone on Capitol Hill has been the victim of McCain’s sociopathic tirades, and many have the apology letters from McCain to prove it.
• “Nowhere is that sentiment stronger than in the Senate, where McCain has few friends or supporters. In fact, when McCain ran for the Republican nomination for president in 2000, only four Republican senators endorsed him,” writes the conservative website NewsMax.
• When two Arizona medical doctors met with McCain to discuss a local endangered squirrel, “He slammed his fists on his desk, scattering papers across the room …. He jumped up and down, screaming obscenities at us for at least 10 minutes. He shook his fists as if he was going to slug us.”
• Says another GOP colleague in the Senate, “I Didn’t Want This Guy Anywhere Near A Trigger.”
• A furious McCain regularly throws F-bombs at his colleagues for no apparent reason.
• In 1995, at the Capitol, McCain had a “scuffle” with 92-year-old Republican Senator Strom Thurmond. That’s right, McCain tried to beat up the one person who was even older than McCain himself.
• “It was election night 1986, and John McCain had just been elected to the U.S. Senate for the first time. Even so, he was not in a good mood. McCain was yelling at the top of his lungs and poking the chest of a young Republican volunteer who had set up a lectern that was too tall for the 5-foot-9 politician to be seen to advantage, according to a witness to the outburst.”
• “The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine,” Republican Senator Thad Cochran said about McCain. “He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me.”

I thought this was mildly amusing when I first read it, but it just got better. Remember all the jokes about how much Elliot Spitzer paid for his hooker? This Michigan Senator’s husband’s humiliation only cost him $150!

Or, is that the difference between an “escort” and a “hooker”?

Anyway, like I said that’s mildly amusing in it’s own right. It gets better: it was originally reported that he was arrested in Big Beaver, MI. Yeah, yeah, beaver jokes. Funny, but still mildly funny. Then it was revealed that Big Beaver is a road, not a town. No real addition to the humor quotient there…

… Except for this:

This was sent by the person who noted the city/road mistake. Stuff like this just can’t be made up, right? No way this is Photoshoppery, right?

From Wonkette: Nation of Cheapskates

Not long ago someone noticed Deutsche Telekom AG, parent company of T-Mobile, claimed it owned the patent on the color magenta in the trademark statement on its website. Other, more heavily trafficked sites picked up on the story, and Engadget (one of my daily reads) went so far as to speak to a copyright attorney about average folks’ rights with respect to this rubbish.

Two days ago, DT sent Engadget Mobile a cease & desist letter regarding the use of magenta in the logo for their sister site, Engadget Mobile. Yesterday Engadget’s editor, Ryan Block, announced a tweaked Engadget Mobile logo and a sort of magenta-wash campaign to protest this obvious abuse of copyright law (it’s obvious when you read the link at the beginning of this paragraph – lays out why this isn’t copyright infringement).

I understand that companies are required to protect their trademarks, copyrights, patents & trade secrets – if they didn’t, such protections would carry no weight. From a legal standpoint, (And obviously my many years in the legal profession, right? Right?) I see where they’re coming from. From a realistic perspective, maybe claiming to own magenta was kind of dumb in the first place. Perhaps if DT invented a color, but magenta is a pretty widely used color. It’s a base color for the CMYK color model (Hello? M == Magenta). While I am a T-Mobile subscriber, I’m not a big fan of magenta on its own, but Ryan’s actually taken to time to comment on this site before. Being the comment-/attention-whore that I am, I feel kind of obligated to give his cause some love. Plus, I agree with him.* So, grab your Che t-shirt & beret, link to the image above, spread the word, fight the power, down w/ the man and all that – you know the rhetoric!

* Block has said many times that this is not an April Fool’s joke. If it is color me, and most of the ‘tubes, gotten. Well played, sir(s).

If you’re into quality toilet humor – and really, who isn’t? – check out the vast empire of blogs maintained by Julia Wertz. Back in college, I had a professor who slept something like 4 hours a night. The rest of the time, he was doing something. Anything. Seriously, the guy never stopped moving. Maybe when he was in the bathroom, but even then I’m not so sure. He probably had a fold out desk in there so he could multi-task while he cleared his bowels/bladder. I play Sodoku.

Why all this about my overactive collegfe professor? Well, two reasons: First, he taught me to pay attention to the way laws are written. For example, did you know there was a loophole in a state’s laws that made a murder carried out in a certain way perfectly legal? Isn’t that awes… err, scary? Second, Julia Wertz sort of reminds me of this guy. She has a great cartoon called the Fart Party. She paints panels from her cartoons. She publishes books of her her comics as well as collaborative books of craigslist missed connections ads (how creative, right?).She reviews restaurants in San Francisco & NYC. She’s also a waitress. It’s tiring to think about all this stuff! I get up in the morning, go to work, goof off for 8-9 hours, come home, drink and go to bed. I’m very good at drinking, but I’m sure I can apply myself to other endeavors without allowing the drinking to suffer.

Anyway, the thing that sparked this was a post on her newest blog the hater’s high-five about sex, relationships and a blue vibrator.

Poor little guy…

Find out how much you can expect based on your tax return.

Just make sure that when you get that check, you spend it immediately so the housing market, and overall economy will do a 180 and everything will be all better again right before W leaves office so we can all remember him as the guy who turned around the economy and saved us from the terrorists.

Remember, spend money for freedom. When you save money, the terrorists win.

Threadless is having a spring cleaning sale, and I found this little number for $9. Not my favorite part of the movie, but still the looks on the crayons’ faces is great. I’m still browsing through the catalog for more hipster-wear, but I did find this one that would make a good present for someone I know. This one’s another possibility for me…