Sony's rootkit: an update

Sony's rootkit: an update

I have come to avoid all commercial distributors of music. This was easy for me since I already had no interest in the music that was being distributed today (the commercial artist's discs all sound too much alike, the discs cost too much compared to burning my own, the tracks are not in a format that I find useful, etc...).

But!

I do listen to Electronic genres such as trance, tech-step, DnB; Electronica is a genre that no big label would want to traffic on a continuous basis. My methods of getting new tracks are simple: I get indie music direct from the indie artist. No middle men means no DRM, at least for now. That 'direct connection' method could easily serve as a workaround to this rootkit problem (and several similar problems) for ANY consumer, if the consumer mounted considerable efforts to demand a direct connection from each artist. To create the direct connection mechanism, simply get a message through to each artist that this kind of user restriction is not acceptable, tell the artist that you would not accept computer hardware that prevents you ripping tracks (which you have been permitted to download direct from the artist) to another format, tell the artist that you would not accept rootkit software, and so forth. If the artists learn to dislike and hopefully distrust the commercial labels that pull this kind of abuse, then maybe the digital era can resume where it left off.

No, I am not naive... Just be sure to accept and obey the terms which the artist places in the copyrights to the tracks you get from them. The broad, unrestricted distribution of copyrighted tracks over p2p was a consumer error - the consumer did not respect the artists copyright, but the copyright was placed there by the label, the artists get convinced that they need copyrights when some artists could care less. Why would some artists not care? Because the middlemen are getting many times more revenue, per track, than the artist gets.