What is this DRM Thing Anyway?

I've been downloading a lot of music through amazon.com lately and I noticed they are pushing that the music you get from them is 'DRM Free."

Now, I know what DRM is but I tend to follow such things. It occurred to me that many people have no idea what DRM means both as an acronym and for themselves.

DRM is and acronym for "Digital Rights Management." Digital Rights Management is a push by the entertainment industry to control digital media. The most common form of this media is MP3s, but DRM also works on other media including video files. Basically, it's encryption that only lets you say, play an audio file, on an authorized device, an authorized number of devices or even an authorized number of times.

DRM could be used to limit your number of plays on a certain music file or even to charge per play.

You see, the concept that the media industry likes to push is that you don't own music. Even when you buy a CD you don't own the songs on that CD. What you own is a piece of plastic that authorizes you to listen to those songs as the RIAA deems fit. That piece of plastic also happens to have those songs on it. In the eyes of the RIAA, ripping your CDs yourself is actually illegal since you're not authorized OT listen to music in that manner.

The largest peddler of DRM music is Apple with iTunes. iTunes music will only play on the iTunes player it's been authorized for on iPods it's been authorized to play on. Don't get me wrong now, I'm not trashing the iPod, in fact, I'd recommend the iPod if you want a nucer music player. i just don't recommend buying your music through iTunes. Get it from Amazon.com or some other DRM free music distributor and import it into iTunes.

So what is DRM free? It's just that, it has no encryption. You can copy it as much as you want to any number of computers and players that you want. Now, the tracks do contain some tracking information so you're not going to want to freely distribute these tracks to all your friends or worse, anonymous internet people with file sharing programs. But you can play them on pretty much any portable music player, including the iPod and copy them around to any of your laptops and PCs to listen at work or while traveling.

So when building your Digital Music library, be sure to shop smart and be aware of the possible pitfalls you may get into down the road.

Comments Enabled

I noticed yesterday that I had disabled comments on this blog. It was originally my intention to install a third party style comment system but it turns out the one I was planning to use is not compatible with a self hosted Blogger blog.

So, realizing this, I re-enabled the local comments.

For those who are not aware of what exactly comments are, here's the short explanation.

Basically Comments allow for discussion of a post within the post or blog itself. Comments are part of what makes a blog a blog. Without comments, you may as well be running a standard website. When you click to leave a comment, you're opening a discussion, not only with the author of the blog but with other commenters on the blog. It's a way to leave instant, public feedback on a blog and it's posts. I've gone ahead and turned on anonymous commenting as well so feel free to use that if you're wary about signing in with a name. I won't spam you in any way though and if it gets abusd i'll disable it.

Cloud Computing

Depending on how much you get around on the web, you may have heard the term "Cloud Computing". Today we'll cover the basic idea of Cloud Computing. You may already be doing Cloud Computing and not even realizing it.

This ties in some with the previous 5 Reasons to Get a Google Account post.

Basically, Cloud Computing is the idea of platform independent applications and storage. Applications are programs, storage is of course, where you keep your files. Most people think of applications as something that comes on a disk or in an exe file that the run and install on their PC. For example, you might install the application Microsoft Office and run it locally on your PC to edit documents and make spreadsheets.

Truth be told, you probably did not install this program at all. If you have it on your personal PC, it's possible it came pre-installed from the company that sold you the PC. If you're in an office environment, it was probably installed by your local IT department. The point is though, that it runs naively on your machine. When you open and save files, they are saved locally nd only accessable from that machine.

The Cloud Computing equivilant would be something like Google Docs. You visit this website and the application runs in your web browser. It'll work on most web browsers and run on any operating system. This is unlike Microsoft Office which runs on Windows or Macintosh only depending on which version you have and doesn't work in Linux at all.

The other benefit of Google Docs is that the files all save on Google's servers off "in the Cloud". This means that you could work on a document at home on your desktop, save it, then go work on it at your office later int he day, then again on your laptop from the coffee shop at lunch. There are methods of achieving the same sort of effect with Microsoft office but this si just one example of Cloud Computing and Google docs involves slightly less hassle.

Another good example of a Cloud Computing application is A.viary.com. While it's currently invitation only, it's effectively an entire editing suite of products that work "in the cloud" through your web browser. They currently only have a limited number of applications available but there's a whole world of possibilities.

Another benefit of working "in the cloud" is colaborative documents and file sharing. You can share a google document with coworker and both of you can make changes to it easily. Files created on a.viary can be shared with other members of the community who can then comment on them or follow your updates and files. This leads to another topic (for another post), Social Networking.

There are some limitations of Cloud Computing. For starters, you're generally limited ont he amount of file space available. The storage at many places is ususually pretty generous but if you do a huge volume of file production you may hit a roadblock.

Another limitation comes from development constraits and issues from working in a web browser. A web browser is not an operating system (yet and doesn't always alow for the same level of computing power that a dedicated locally installed application can provide. Google Docs is convenient and easy but it's still nowhere near as powerful as a real Office Suite.

That pretty much wraps up this little intro into Cloud Computing, I hope you've enjoyed it. We'll touch on this topic more in the future.