We've always had our concerns about the ridiculous DMCA "exemptions" process concerning circumvention of digital locks. If you don't know, the DMCA has a strict anti-circumvention rule that says breaking digital locks, such as DRM, is itself a violation of copyright law, even if the purpose of the lock-breaking does not infringe on anyone's copyright. As a sort of "pressure valve" every three years, people can "apply" to the Librarian of Congress for exemptions to that rule. This, of course, is completely ridiculous and backwards. We need to apply, once every three years, to use legally purchased products the way we want to without it being considered illegal? That's crazy. But it's the way things are set up, and it can lead to some bizarre scenarios. As we explained last year when the latest round of exemptions was announced, the Librarian of Congress took away the exemption for unlocking your phone... but provided a 90 day window.

That window ends on Sunday. In other words, unlocking your phone on Saturday: legal. Unlocking your phone on Sunday: you probably just broke the law. As the EFF properly notes, this is not what copyright law is supposed to be about:

"Arguably, locking phone users into one carrier is not at all what the DMCA was meant to do. It's up to the courts to decide."

I don't even think there's anything "arguable" about it. Copyright law has no business being involved in deciding whether or not my phone can be unlocked. It's silly that this is an issue. It's silly that there needed to be an exemption in the first place. And it's silly that this exemption is being taken away. It's for things like this that people lose respect for copyright law.

This is from a little while ago, but I'm just catching up on some older stories. Reader Rabbit80 points us to the news that Nokia has finally put its "Comes with Music" program out of its misery and shut it down. Comes with Music was actually an interesting idea: you buy a phone and for 12 months you get free music downloads. At a conceptual level, this sounds great: you're using the abundant (free music!) to make the scarce (mobile phone!) more valuable. But, like everything, a good idea can be marred by the execution. And, in this case, the execution involved the major record labels demanding that "Comes with Music" really mean "Comes with DRM'd Music." A year and a half ago we pointed out that Comes With Music was really getting very little uptake, and the decision to kill it off just confirms how weak the pickup was.

Nokia says that it was the DRM that was the real killer:

"The markets clearly want a DRM-free music service."

And, of course, there was nothing stopping the labels from allowing a DRM-free service, but they still have this infatuation with DRM, even though they finally came around to ditching the DRM on MP3 sales.

That said, this little real world experiment once again seems to highlight how the claim that "people just want stuff for free" is a myth. Here was a case where people could get the music they wanted for free... but it came limited and so they weren't interested. It's rarely about people just wanting stuff for free. It's often about the restrictions or the convenience of things. The price is nice, but it's rarely the key factor, despite what some industry folks would like to claim.

Last month, we wrote a bit about Ubisoft's bizarre anti-consumer policy of using DRM on games that requires an internet connection to check in (even if you're just playing locally). But, it gets worse. As a whole bunch of you sent in (but compgeek was first), apparently it doesn't just check once to see if you have an internet connection, but regularly checks, and if you've lost that internet connection, it will boot you out of the game and you'll lose everything that you've done since your last checkpoint or save. This is a serious problem for anyone who has even slightly flakey WiFi or an internet connection that goes down frequently (all too common these days). Ubisoft's history with DRM is filled with similar missteps, and it's really amazing that the company seems to be so oblivious to why treating fans badly is such a bad idea.

It's really amazing how the use of DRM makes companies do stupid things. They get so focused on "protecting" they don't realize how all that protection hurts them. It happens over and over again. The latest such example is that developers for Google's Android mobile OS are discovering they can't access paid apps in the Android Market. Why? Because Google is afraid that developers, with greater levels of access, will be able to "break" the DRM and create unauthorized copies. Of course, people will figure out how to break the DRM and make unauthorized copies anyway. So all Google has really done is (a) piss off a lot of developers (b) shrink the market for paid apps (c) make it that much more difficult for developers to get, create and test such paid apps. In all this focus on protecting, Google seems to have missed out on the fact that it's more important to be creating and building than protecting.

The pop band The Presidents of the United States of America have released a special iPhone app that contains all of the music from all of their albums, as well as additional rare and unreleased music and images. The whole thing costs $3 -- which certainly blows the old $1/song model out of the water. It's worth noting that one of the band members is now VP of the software company that made the app... and the band actually owns all the rights to its own music -- so that made all of this much easier. Also, it's a bit unclear how the app works exactly, but it certainly looks like the music is locked (hello, DRM!) inside the app. That's annoying.

There have been a few other bands that have experimented with similar "album in an app" type models before, and it's certainly an experiment worth watching. However, by itself, I'm not sure how scalable the model really is. If other bands do this using different apps, then you have to run each one separately and you lose out on the benefit of a central control system for all your music. And, if it really does involve DRM, then bands may just jump on this and alienate fans yet again. Still, if a "standard" and open way of doing this was established, such that bands could have their own apps easily interoperate, and the music wasn't locked down, you could see some interesting models emerge. For example, imagine getting an app that actually kept you updated on a band? Every time they release a new song or add new artwork, it automatically is added to your collection across different devices. That would be a useful application. Unfortunately, this particular app only seems to be a tiny step in that direction (and due to DRM, perhaps a step in the wrong direction).

It pretty much goes without saying at this point that any DRM can and will be cracked -- and, of course, once cracked, the content is now freely available pretty much anywhere. It still makes you wonder why anyone bothers. The latest is that Nokia's hyped up "Comes with Music" offering (which has been a commercial disappointment) has had its DRM cracked, and it's unlikely that much can be done to block the DRM cracking system. Once again, you have to ask why Nokia even bothered?

In recent years, we've seen the entertainment industry suddenly embrace mobile as a platform, incorrectly believing that its more locked-down nature would mean that it wouldn't face the same "threats" (which they should see as opportunities) of file sharing and open networks and services. However, as is always the way, more open systems are catching on and getting more usage, and more closed systems are having trouble getting traction. Rather than embracing that, however, it appears Nokia is pushing to hold back the tide.

Ben S writes in to highlight a rather unconvincing talk given by a Nokia VP trying to explain to open source developers why they need to embrace DRM, intellectual property, digital locks and subsidies in the mobile world. However, his reasoning basically amounts to "because I say so."

"Why do we need closed vehicles? We do. Some of these things harm the industry but they're here [as things stand]."

In other words, there's no actual reason to use these things, other than that Nokia says you must -- even though it knows such things harm the industry. Way to show leadership in the mobile industry. No wonder it seems like most innovation in the mobile space is coming from folks other than Nokia.

It really was just last week, right, that Microsoft was last seen totally screwing over all those partners who had signed up to use its misnamed "PlaysForSure" DRM? Apparently, bygones are bygones and other companies have no problem stepping right up into Microsoft's embrace on a new DRM solution -- this time in the mobile space. Nokia is apparently agreeing to use Microsoft's mobile DRM offering dubbed "PlayReady" on a variety of Nokia devices. You would have thought that after the PlaysForSure debacle, Microsoft would avoid dubbing its DRM anything similar. Give it a few years and perhaps Microsoft will support some totally different DRM on its own phones (like it did with the Zune) and then we can ask again what Nokia was thinking.