http://www.lessig.org/blog
WalMart's Way to the Future

WalMart’s launched a music downloading service. For just 88 cents, you can download a song in a Windows Media Player format. I tried the service. For 88 cents I bought a Beatles song (they’ve got a total of 12 available. Wuhoo!). When I went to play it, however, it wouldn’t. LiquidAudio’s server was not found.

But the real devil here is not that the service doesn’t (yet) work. It is the details of the TOS. These are among the most restrictive in the business, authorizing 10 burns from 3 machines, but requiring you promise:
“You may not reproduce (except as noted above), publish, transmit, distribute, display, broadcast, re-broadcast, modify, create derivative works from, sell or participate in any sale of or exploit in any way, in whole or in part, directly or indirectly, any of the Products, the Service or any related software. You may not reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, modify or disable any copy protection or use limitation systems associated with the Products. You may not play and then re-digitize any Products, or upload those Products to the Internet. You may not use the Products in conjunction with any other third-party content (e.g, to provide sound for a film). You may not sell or offer to sell the Products, including but not limited to, posting any Product for auction, on any Internet auction site. All Products are sublicensed to you and not sold, notwithstanding the use of the terms “sell,” “purchase,” “order,” or “buy” on the Service or in this Agreement.”

So, the “Rip,Mix,Burn” culture has now been cancelled. Want to sync a song with the home movie of your kid? You can’t. You’ve promised you won’t. Want to display a slide show of pictures taken at Christmas? you can’t. You’ve promised you won’t. Any derivative use if banned by this agreement (and by the code built into WM9) — and remember, if you use a tool to crack those protections, you’ve violated the DMCA.

Worse still, if you go to this page, you’ll be informed that “What’s more, you’ll enjoy the same usage rights for ALL the music you purchase” as if you had purchased the CD. Here is where all the action is. What’s happening with this download world is that the “rights” people have with music are now to be defined by licenses. Long before we have any useful litigation about the fair use rights associated with music, the licenses will define that you have only the right to play the music, and only the right to burn it 10 times. Anything more — for any reuse, mixing, transforming, even for noncommercial use — is not your “right.”

This is the real aim of the “war” against “piracy.” Focus the attention of the world on “pirates” and then “solve” that problem in a way that effectively removes all other creative rights for consumers. This is a total perversion of copyright law, as the late Professor Lyman Ray Patterson showed. The law, intended to regulate competitors, is now a tool for controlling consumers.

WM9 is a suckky music format, and wma in general suxs, any service that desn't use OGG or MP3 VBR or other derivitives of MP3 I will refuse to use, basically because everything else sux. and that basically means i'll never use a RIAA 'mp3' music service.

who would really buy digital music from walmart anyway?

Who would buy music from wal mart period they censor everything and when was the last time you saw an indie cd in their stores?

Along with informing the public that there is plenty of non-riaa music to listen to, they also need to be informed of the restrictive wma format. (Don't forget that)

I gotta agree with mtekk. When encoding my own music, I prefer ogg. It sounds good and I encourage others to try it.

I will ask fu-dog to make sure we support Ogg vorbis.

BTW, Mp3 VBR is very cool.

Next contest? "CD titles you would never see at WalMart"

Walmart Shoppers - For the next 15 minutes we are having a sale on Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts.

I have started to read Jessica Litman's "Digital copyright. " Great book. Explains a lot of what Tom Barger and Lessig are talking about.

In the very near future, btw, there will be no libraries ( funding for most libaries have stopped or greatly diminshed, I am told), and no books. Only the likes of Valenti, Rosen, Sherman and WalMart.

This is the future that copyright maximalists have crafted for us.

Wonderful.

The derivitive use item is by far the most appalling restriction.

So if you download a song and decided to update it (assuming it's one of Lessig's Beatles' songs) by recording your own version, it's now against the law. Imagine.

Cover songs have been outlawed by WalMart's TOS, or so it would seem.

Do we have to physically go into the streets to revolt against this arrogant stupidity and violation of the Constitution?

Here's the solution: Don't sign up for the service, don't download the second-rate pieces of dog crap they offer. If all the competent people don't use it, then they'll come up short or only make a marginal profit off the "lesser intelligent" people. Meanwhile, p2p and crew present a much more appealing service that the "greater intelligent" people use, and give them all the market.

Don't come whining, don't come suing because we DON'T like your product. We don't have to buy squat from Walmart or anyone. But you NEED us to buy it for you to have a business, otherwise you're just another busted corporation filing for bankrupcy.

So many restrictions! I wouldn't be surprised if "do not play" was somehow translated into lawyers terms and put in there.

Bleh. Walmart are censor-whores when it comes to music. And from the looks of it their service is going to flop BADLY. Too many restrictions is a bad marketing plan, both for the consumers and Wally World.

Basically Walmart is trying to say that everything you download from their crap-ass service is yours, you just cant do anything with it or else they'll DMCA-Whore your ass.

I use the DMCA as toilet paper BTW

Hey Leflaw, jump ahead to page 123 to 149 of Litman's book. Bruce Lehman going back and forth from the WIPO international treaties and US Congress with sneaky tricks tryuing to convince onne or the other to get in line with maximalist protectionns for dinosaur industry. . Mitch Glazier is indeed the fellow "carrying the water" for the entertainment industry, and all while working for Coble.

This is the same Walmart that gets sued for not paying their employees overtime, and gets busted by the FBI for paying immigrants $2.00 per day to clean their stores. The same Walmart that dictates prices to its suppliers, often forcing their suppliers to have their products made overseas where the labor is cheaper and the workers have no rights, resulting in the loss of jobs in the USA.

Walmart can go to hell for Christmas.

Check out http://www.walmartwatch.org/

Wal-Mart is at the top of the heap as far as corporate evil goes. WMA format is shit, and not only that but when i buy anything, i'll do whatever i damn want with it considering its now MINE. I won't promis anything at all to a corporation, would they keep promise to me? What about there professional liars? (aka Marketing Team) No Thank You, Wal-Mart

i'm sorry that had a couple mistakes in it as far as sentence structure and spelling, lol

I'm going to say this yet again. I will not pay for an inferior MP3 file. I don't care who is selling it. If they want to give the mp3 version away as a promotional tool and sell me a digital quality recording that's fine. Anybody who does pay companies like wally-world for an inferior product shouldn't really be surprised that wally-world is going to rape them on the TOS as well. Simple solution. If it means so much to to them to keep their riaa crap, let them keep it. the rest of us will use something else.

this sounds like an attack on fair use more than "piracy"

I'm not supporting DRM here but, the alternative would be to trust their users not to share the songs after they download them.

hey Tom Barger --

Incredible -- Nobody who had a hand in drafting the green or white papers of the NII had ever logged onto the internet???

Unbelievable!!!!!!

High 5 captdunsel
I'm with you on that

"Do we have to physically go into the streets to revolt against this arrogant stupidity and violation of the Constitution?"

Unfortunately the answer is probably yes.

This is the funniest thing I've heard!!!

Working in retail tells you a lot...

I betcha in about three days someone finds a hack to download it for free and then after that, walmart closes up shop.

Fuque WallyWorld.

Hey Leflaw, as you can see, the only person who stood up and yelled "the sky is falling!" was --Pamela Samuelson. Without her, gawd knows what kind of society we'd be living in. The Bruce Lehman-inspired DMCA was almost completely bum-rushed through Congress without debate.


Bruce Lehman came from the Patent Office. He would not listen to other people's opinions on the Board. He had an agenda. And Glazier was assigned the task of shepherding the legislation through Congress.

As you can see, Boucher threw a monkey wrench in the process, insisting that the Commerce Committee have a look at it. Glazier just about had an apoplectic fit.

Lehman's activities since that time has been to join the private industry. He made efforts to find financing to buy BMI and failed. His dream apparently while in government was to create a new regulatory copyright-oriented board; re-jopin private inudstry and make himself Patent God. A mutual friend tells the story, he went to lunch with someone, and this guy Lehman shows up. He ranted and raved and pounded the table and said, "This rich c*** Samuelson is following me around the country and ruining my financing!"

More than any other example I can think of, this proves that we need to put teeth in the regulation that says, you cannot set policy and then join that same industry for two years. We USED to have that policy, but the last legislation that Clinton signed before he left the White House was to repeal it.

Michael Eisner has always been golfing buddies with Clinton, who frequently spent time on the Eisner compund in Aspen. It was a small matter to say, "Sure, Michael, if it means so much to you, we'll set up an copyright advisory group INSIDE the White House."

Al Gore then says, "We'll be the leaders in the Super Information Highway, and if you Hollywood guys claim that the pipes won't fill up without your entertainment, then, heck yeah, we'll create protection for your shit.'

The truth is, the internet flourished THEN without Hollywood crap and these days, even more so. If Hollywood film studios and major label artists don't want to participate in new revenue streams--THAT'S FINE WITH US!!!! Fuck 'em.


An interesting note for people to keep in mind, is that Congress must agree on the terms of any trade treaties. For example, Bruce Lehman initially failed to get the DMCA passed in Congress, so he went to WIPO. The idea is to get Congress persuaded that US needs to get in line with international copyright treaties. However, he failed at convincing WIPO.

Back to Congress, then and he says, we Americans need to lead the way and pass the DMCA in America first so we can go back to WIPO with a big stick.

This is still going on. But its Jay Berman at the IFPI now. And he is trying multiple jurisdictions with GATT and FTAA etc. So far, he's only managed to pull together a ragtag group of Axis of Evil backwater countries. Some tradeoff is in the works, of course, something ridiculous like cotton tariffs in exchange for copyright police actions. I suspect these countries have no concept of intellectual property policies and are laughing behind their hand---reminds me of the Indians who traded Manhatten island for $24 of beads and rode away feeling sorry for the silly Dutchmen they had ripped off.

Nice business. Makes ya proud to be an Amerikan.

rolling eyes why bother with wally worlds and the evil that they do, Just say no to DRM the new drug of evil Corporations and their download stores.

i upgraded to WM9 only becose i will neaver play a leagly brought MP3 on it any way i only did it so i could stream the lastest kinky VIDS on perv web sites :0O lol for me and my girl other then that since i can't buy a song that i can down load at will and burn as many times as i would like in as many formats as i would like to brun it in
also bleep out words i would not like my kids (well when i get kids) to lisson to
or maybe i would like to compress the song to a format that would be better suted for my MP3 player my MP3 player only plays mp3 ogg......can't do that any more

o what a wonderfull world thank god P2P is around

i mean think about it if it whas not for p2p how would we be getting are music right now
and do not tell me you think it would be from music D/Ls no thay only started offering them after p2p almost killed them CD maybe? nah thay choped up CDs into one or two good songs and priced it 10 dollers more
would it be from e-mail

YEP E-MAIL!!!!!! thats whare we would be getting music
from are friends and family MP3 threw the mail
brillent idea if i do say so my self

you know what 9/11 should not have been the trade center nope thay have the wrong simble or the U.S greed
thay should have hit the RIAA head quoters maybe tag cray-sue right betwen the eyes

Leflaw,

Glad to see you enjoying high rate encoded mp3 files. They aren't so bad if they're encoded right are they?

I can't imagine anyone would be willing to pay walmart or any other download service for the privledge to sample an inferior drm ridden file in the first place. If you wish to sample without drm restriction, find a decent mp3 ftp server. Unrestricted mp3s are the future.

Don't feel sorry for the artists either, These ftp servers are free advertising, and digitally speaking; airplay they couldn't otherwise get.