DRM | The "Break it Down" Blog

Amazon MP3 Download Service Review

Friday, September 5, 2008

After growing increasingly unimpressed with the Apple iTunes/iPod “lock-in” model I started hunting around for alternative low-cost music services online. Fortunately one of the first and favorite services I ran into is the relatively new Amazon MP3 Downloads service. Some of the big highlights of the Amazon MP3 service for me were: Non-DRM’ed music Low-cost music (about $0.99 [...]

Re-Conditioned Classic Games for Windows XP/Vista

Friday, July 11, 2008

3 Comments

How cool is this, the European publisher CD Projekt (guys behind The Witcher) has approached the owners of some of the best classic PC titles of the past and bought the rights to them in order to port them completely to Windows XP/Vista platform (even re-doing the installers) and then turn around and sell them [...]

FCC Wants Your Feedback on MPAA DVR Lock-Down

Friday, June 13, 2008

0 Comments

In an effort to make sure that consumers don’t enjoy their content too much, the MPAA is trying to push the adoption of Selectable Output Control (SOC), which would allow the MPAA to remotely decide when a movie could or couldn’t be recorded by our DVR. The point of contention came when the FCC stepped [...]

Anti-Piracy Chip to Stop PC Piracy

Saturday, May 24, 2008

2 Comments

Atari’s Nolan Bushnell give’s a blurb: Speaking at yesterday’s Wedbush Morgan Securities annual Management Access Conference, the Atari founder suggested that game piracy will soon be a thing of the past thanks to a new chip. “There is a stealth encryption chip called a TPM that is going on the motherboards of most of the computers that [...]

Crazy DRM From Mass Effect PC Removed

Monday, May 12, 2008

0 Comments

Nice… there was so much community crying over the super-call-home DRM that was going to go into Spore and Mass Effect PC, that EA redacted it and has gone back to classic SecuROM with a 1-time activation. W00t for online whining!

Mass Effect PC Will Have Insane Copy Protection

Wednesday, May 7, 2008

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Apparently Mass Effect, PC Edition will use a ridiculous new version of the SecuROM copy projection that will phone home back to the EA authentication servers every 5-10 days you launch the game. Not just on initial launch, or even the default SecuROM behavior of checking the disk security (that causes so many launch failures [...]

Xbox 360 DRM Can’t Handle RRoD

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

4 Comments

Update #1: Laurence Hartje, having gone through this process, set the record straight down in the comments. Things aren’t as bad as originally thought. Microsoft’s Xbox DRM will lock you out of your own content if you get your red-ringed Xbox replaced. I bolded that sentence, to give you something to chew on. If you got your Xbox [...]

DRM’ed Music is Dead - Long Live Amazon!

Monday, January 14, 2008

0 Comments

Todd Swarthout sent in news about the kickass announcement that Amazon’s MP3 service now offers DRM-free music from all 4 of the major music labels as of January 10th! Sony BMG Warner EMI Universal Music This is in a followup to the news we reported on Amazon recently securing contracts with Sony BMG and Sony BMG, before that, decided DRM [...]

Sony BMG Quits with the DRM

Saturday, January 5, 2008

0 Comments

Thank the gods. Sony BMG has agreed to stop shipping DRM’ed music on it’s disks as they suddenly realized while they were flailing around trying to “stop all the piracy” that costs the RIAA $77 trillion dollars a year (rough estimate) Apple was kicking their ass at legitimate music sales. Seems to suggest the rampant piracy [...]

Windows Vista HDMI DRM Fucks All DRM’ed Media

Thursday, January 3, 2008

4 Comments

Laurence Hartje sends in a link to a story that is pure-suck… The gist of this (as I understand it) is that in Windows Vista, the new DRM functionality in the operating system is universal and tied to the hardware. More specifically, if you purchase movies while a monitor with a specific HDMI signature is attached [...]

Removing iTunes DRM

Friday, September 7, 2007

1 Comment

You curious how to rip Apple’s iTunes DRM out of the music you’ve bought and have limited rights to? Click on over and get some ideas. Summary: Got a Mac?Â FairGame Got a PC? QTFairUse6

iTunes DRM-Free Music Embeds Account Information

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

0 Comments

Very interesting post over on TUAW. It looks like the DRM-free music you can download from iTunes now (and hopefully growing in the future) is not something you would likely want to throw up on a torrent site anytime soon, mostly due to the fact that the mp4 file contains your personal information in it. Erica [...]

The “Break it Down” Blog

Tag Archive | "DRM"

Amazon MP3 Download Service Review

Re-Conditioned Classic Games for Windows XP/Vista

FCC Wants Your Feedback on MPAA DVR Lock-Down

Anti-Piracy Chip to Stop PC Piracy

Crazy DRM From Mass Effect PC Removed

Mass Effect PC Will Have Insane Copy Protection

Xbox 360 DRM Can’t Handle RRoD

DRM’ed Music is Dead - Long Live Amazon!

Sony BMG Quits with the DRM

Windows Vista HDMI DRM Fucks All DRM’ed Media

Removing iTunes DRM

iTunes DRM-Free Music Embeds Account Information

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