Sony BMG to drop copy protection for downloads
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Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the world's second largest music company, will this month become the last of the big four majors to drop copy protection software on music downloads, also known as digital rights management (DRM).
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Online retailer Amazon.com Inc   said on Thursday its digital music store will now  offer songs from Sony BMG Music Entertainment without  copy-protection technology, or digital rights management.
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Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the last major music label holding out against selling music online without copy protection, relented Thursday and announced Amazon.com Inc.'s digital music store will carry songs by its artists.
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LOS ANGELES - Sony BMG Music Entertainment and online peer-to-peer software distributor Grokster are working on a new venture that is expected to offer paid and free song downloads over the Internet, sources say.
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'NO copy protection - respect the music' stamped on !K7 discs
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Sony&#39;s music unit is abandoning its CDs that use built-in technology that limits copying them, after pushing the program for two years.
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Sony BMG Music Entertainment will pay $1.5 million and kick in thousands more in customer refunds to settle lawsuits brought by California and Texas over music CDs that installed a hidden anti-piracy program on consumers' computers.
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TOKYO -- Sony BMG will start selling music downloads in the copy-protection-free MP3 format later this month in North America, as even the last holdout among the major record labels crumbled to the growing trend.
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In a major strategic reversal, Sony Corp. said Wednesday it plans to add support for MP3 music files to some of its portable music players.
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Sony BMG announces a deal with Amazon to put tracks online that are free of copy controls.
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Sony BMG will start selling music downloads in the copy-protection-free MP3 format later this month in North America, as even the last holdout among the major record labels crumbled to the growing trend.
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Sony BMG Tuesday offered either early retirement or voluntary severance to all eligible employees at the newly formed music giant, warning that future layoffs may not be accompanied by such generous terms.
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The latest version of Hymn can already remove DRM protection from songs purchased from the iTunes 7 store to enable playback on non-iPod players.  In Listening Post.
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(InfoWorld) - Yahoo put another music track without DRM (digital rights management) on sale through its Yahoo Music service Tuesday. The Norah Jones single "Thinking About You" sells for $0.99, in MP3 format on Yahoo's music store, and in DRM-encumbered AAC format on Apple Computer's iTunes Store. Both formats will play on PCs, Macs, and the market-leading iPod portable music player, but only the MP3 version will play on other portable music players. DRM technology is used to set limits on how, when, how many times, and on what devices a file may be played. While DRM can be applied to music in AAC, ATRAC, or WMA format, it cannot be introduced into MP3 files. Yahoo first experimented withÂ selling MP3 files without DRMÂ in July, when it offered Jessica Simpson's "A Public Affair" as an MP3 file for $1.99. While that track was not tied to a particular PC or music player with DRM, the audio track was personalized to contain a first name of the purchaser's choice, picked from a list of hundreds of prerecorded names, limiting its interest to other listeners. Since then, Yahoo has sold an entire album by the artist Jesse McCartney in both MP3 and the DRM-encumbered WMA (Windows Media Audio) format, but has not published sales figures for the two formats. Some see the release of tracks in MP3 format, without DRM, as a big gamble for record labels, as nothing prevents buyers from uploading them to file-sharing networks. In reality, DRM does little to stop such behavior, but makes life harder for legitimate music users, said analyst Mark Mulligan, a vice president at Jupiter Research in the U.K. "Most of the DRM in place is not going to stop piracy. You've got limits on CD-burning, but all of that is cracked immediately if you burn it onto CD and rip it back in again. Anyone with an ounce of tech-savvy is going to know how to get around that," he said. But the fact that there's nothing to stop listeners copying and sharing MP3 files could work to record labels' advantage, said Mulligan. "It's going to be implemented more as marketing than anything else," he said. Blue Note Records, the record label promoting the Jones track, is only releasing the single, not an entire album, in MP3 format for now. If Mulligan is right, it could be just a marketing gimmick to build awareness of the album, which will go on sale in January. Major record labels are starting toÂ look more seriously at MP3 distributionÂ because of the success of eMusic.com, which Mulligan says is the second-largest online music download store in the U.S., after that of Apple. EMusic sells music from independent record labels in MP3 format.
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Edging cautiously into the water where Amazon, Apple's iTunes, eMusic and other services are already frolicking, Sony BMG Music has announced plans to offer a tiny set of DRM-free tracks online... if you go to one of their brick-and-mortar stores first.
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The Warner Music Groupâs announcement is the recording industryâs latest move away from its reliance on digital locks to reduce piracy.
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(InfoWorld) - A German company is offering MP3 files for download, unencumbered by DRM (digital rights management). Instead, Akuma discourages copying by adding a unique "watermark" to each download. Major record labels have mostly chosen DRM to protect their copyrights, limiting the number of copies buyers can make of a downloaded track, and restricting the music players they can use to listen to it. However, Akuma is taking a softer approach: The music store sells MP3 files which can be played on almostÂ any digital music player, but adds a unique tag to each download using watermark technology from Germany's renowned Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, which helped create the MP3 audio compression algorithm. The watermark technology makes slight changes to the data in sound files, such as a higher volume intensity in a tiny part of a song, that are undetectable by even the best trained ears, according to Fraunhofer researchers. However, if unauthorized copies of a download turn up on, for example, peer-to-peer file sharing networks, the watermark allows Akuma to identify the purchaser of a file and take action against them. "Around 40 percent of the labels we offer are embedded with watermarks," said Sascha Hottes, a managing director of H2 Media Factory, which launched Akuma. "This is the compromise we've reached with labels that are willing to release their titles in the MP3 format and not in Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format with its DRM technology." As part of its service, Akuma monitors songs embedded with a watermark against illegal distribution on P-to-P services, according to Hottes. "We monitor P-to-P networks on a random basis," he said. Around 350,000 songs, mostly from independent labels, are currently available on the Akuma portal, with 700,000 planned by the end of the year. The roster includes artists such as Katie Melua, Toni Braxton, Simply Red and Deep Purple. A single song title costs â¬0.89, ($1.13) an album â¬4.49. Customers have various payment options: online, direct debit, telephone invoice and PayPal. Akuma offers MP3 files in a quality similar to CDs, with bit rates (a measure of sound quality) from 192KbpsÂ at the low end to 320Kbps at the high end. Like eMusic.com, the German music download store hopes toÂ break into a crowded marketÂ by making song downloading a piece of cake. The German portal requires no special download software and places no restrictions on the choice of music player, including the iPod from Apple Computer. Customers can make as many copies of the songs as they like, burn them to CDs and transfer them onto multiple portable music players. TheÂ akuma.de portalÂ is now available in a beta version to registered users.