A Bad Experience with DRM

Submitted by Michael on Sat, 2007-05-26 08:59

A couple of days ago I made my first DRM-protected music purchase: the Supreme Commander soundtrack from the DirectSong online store. I've long been a fan of Jeremy Soule's work, ever since I heard the wonderful Total Annihilation soundtrack.

I'm idealogically opposed to most forms of DRM, as I believe that they are capable of removing fundamental consumer rights, and can easily be abused by the content providers. Indeed, the whole issue of buy/license/copy rights is completely broken in this age of instant, flawless, free digital copies, but no-one's though of a universally acceptable solution yet. I made an exception in this case, as although DirectSong's albums are encoded in Windows Media Audio with Janus DRM protection, they are at 320kb/s, and have the right to burn to CD. Their FAQ says that to the recommended way to use the music with a non-Janus device, such as a Mac or an iPod or Microsoft's own Zune, is simply to burn and re-rip a CD. They even provide cover art; one wonders why they bother with DRM at all!

Big mistake. I was bitten by one of the biggest problems with DRM — the content controllers can rescind users' rights at will, or inadvertently remove them through sufficiently advanced incompetence. In this case I think the fault lay with Windows Media Player 11 on Windows Vista. After I'd `gained' rights for my machine to play the music, the media properties in WMP claimed that I had absolutely no rights at all. No burning rights, no synching rights, not even playing rights — but it played fine. If this isn't a bug, I don't know what is. I've been prevented from doing something which I paid to be permitted to do! Since I use Linux and a Janus-incompatible portable media player most of the time, this effectively stopped me from using my music at all. And let's not forget that Microsoft removed the right to back up your licenses with Media Player 11, so that if you reinstall your OS, you lose one of your precious hardware licenses.

Apart from my personal inconvenience while I pester DirectSong to sort this out, and research DRM-stripping software such as FairUse4WM, this is probably a good thing. Hopefully, broken implementations of DRM will badly burn people and turn them against DRM before the content mafia legally gain absolute control over all our PC hardware. I'll certainly think twice before buying DRM'd tracks again.

Update (2007/05/30): DirectSong got back to me pretty quickly, and I'm satisfied with the way they've handled it. It turns out they've haven't yet been able to get their tracks to work properly on Media Player 11, as Microsoft have broken backwards compatibility. It may be a while until I can buy anything else from them...

Comments

Chris

Fri, 2007-07-06 03:49

I'm also having issues with directsong and the Supreme Commander soundtrack. When I first purchased the soundtrack it wouldn't show up in my downloads list so I had to email them. After about 2 days they reply back that they fixed it. Great I think so I fire up the download get the DRM sorted and toss a blank cd in to burn it so I can listen to it in my home theater and car.

Thats when I ran into your EXACT problem as I am also running Vista and the latest and 'greatest' version of WMP. Now I'm stuck unable to use my legally purchased music.

To top it off this was also my first purchase of DRM'ed music and it will be my last. I don't mind buying music, I'm not a pirate but I'd like to actually be able to enjoy what I purchased!

Anonymous

Sun, 2008-01-13 20:51

You guys should check out the Amazon MP3 store: no DRM, low prices, big catalog. I checked, and they don't have the SupCom soundtrack, but they do have damn near everything else -- including the Half-Life: Orange Box soundtrack. I bought "Still Alive (J.C. Remix)" from that soundtrack a couple weeks ago, and then Daft Punk's Alive 2007 shortly after that. It was easy and cheap -- I'm never going back to iTunes.

Michael

Mon, 2008-01-14 18:16

I've bough more stuff from DirectSong and have been able to extract it quite happily. Thing is, DirectSong have a monopoly on most of Jeremy Soule's work. Some of the other stuff is on iTunes, but I've resolved never to go near that due to Apple's attitude towards open-source compatibility in general.

Amazon's store is certainly welcome news, though I'm disappointed by the 256kb/s MP3s vs. DirectSong's 320kb/s WMA, especially considering that WMA makes better use of the bits! Hopefully Amazon's success will convince everyone that DRM is pretty pointless and generally serves only to annoy the consumer, and hence lead to the field of DRM-free music opening up more.

I'm going to have to get "Still Alive" however. Thanks for pointing that out :)

Anonymous

Sun, 2008-11-09 20:53

While this is still a problem with DirectSong, I have never had a problem with Apple's DRM via iTunes. I've used iTunes on both my PC and Mac w/o any issues what so ever. Back to DirectSong. I contacted them in January of this year, 2008 about burn right. It's the same story as before, still no burn rights in Vista. What I DID find out is that Microsoft virtual PC is free as is the Internet Explorer 6/7 Windows XP image. This is a non-updated or updateable image that comes with WMP 9. I copy my DirectSong purchases into the image and get the license. It states that the DRM needs to be updated, and I've allowed it to do so. When it's done and I have my license, I use a virtual CD burner such as NoteBurner or Virtual CD v9 to burn the tracks to a virtual disk. THIS IS NOT THE SAME AS BURNING A CD. You arent doing anything here except removing the copy protection and/or changing formats. It puts the converted/de-drmed music wherever you choose and now you're music is usable on any device. This is perfectly legal and probably the best way to remove DRM from any purchased music. The Virtual CD and Noteburner softwares both work in Vista (32bit only) as well so if you have DRMed itunes music, this is perfect!

I AM satisfied with Directsong as they have tried to fix the issue, but the issue is an Iron Fisted Microsoft problem.

Dugan

Wed, 2008-11-19 12:54

Same experience yesterday with the Oblivion soundtrack. There was no way to get burn rights on my Vista box. The solution was to use up a machine license to to install the soundtrack on my XP box, then downgrade the XP box from WMP11 to WMP10.

The incompatibilities with WMP11 have existed for at least a year and a half, aren't documented anywhere on DirectSong's website, and prevent customers with current software from getting their money's worth. I'm disappointed in DirectSong.

Chris

Tue, 2009-02-10 18:56

Same here. Foolishly purchased my first DRM soundtrack from DirectSong in the form of SupCom OST... and no burn rights. No explanation as to what's going on.

Personally, I'm done with this crap. If there were such catastrophic problems with WMP 11 then they should have been mentioned on the website, instead of flat out lies about how I can burn whatever I wish. It's a real shame as it's a great OST.

I'll be contacting trading standards about this.

torq314

Mon, 2009-02-16 17:04

again - same here. I've bought Morrowind and Oblivion from them. at first I couldn't download anything, both downloaders say only that I am not connected to the internet. I resolved this by downloading DIRECTLY from their ftp (the address is mentioned somewhere in the knowledgebase).

then another issue - javascript error on registering page. I've lost TWO damned licenses (out of four) to finally find out that you have to LOWER the security setting for cookies in IE.

and then the last but not least issue - you cannot burn anything with MP11. file properties says that I have burning rights, but whenever I DRAG files in the burning list, these rights are magically gone.

luckily I've found this post and your comments and downgraded MP11 to MP10. Now, after I've ripped the music from the CD, I am finally satisfied but will NEVER buy anything from DirectSong. sad but true. I would love to support Jeremy but will never support such botchery.

Anonymous

Thu, 2009-05-28 01:00

With a few exceptions, DirectSong has gone DRM free. Try and see if you can redownload the drm-free version

Michael

Tue, 2009-06-02 13:53

I discovered this myself a few days ago when checking for new music, and re-downloaded everything I've bought. I'm a little disappointed to see that some of my music no longer seems to be available (e.g. Guild Wars Nightfall Collector's Editor Bonus Music), and that the MP3s are lower quality than the WMAs (WMA, AAC, Vorbis etc are higher quality than MP3 at the same bitrate). Hopefully one day they'll switch to FLAC :)