To celebrate, get 50% off all e-books at oreilly.com – today only! Use the code DRMFREE.

I’m running out of CPU – quick, head over to the corner store for an Intel scratch card!

Is this an alternate universe? And, how long before they sell cards that will unlock extra features, but only for a limited time?

I guess now we know at least one concrete reason why Intel does not like coreboot. You can’t restrict people like this when their computer does not have a proprietary BIOS.

I am not aware of any devices that actually use the DRM on SD/SDHC cards (feel free to comment if you know of any!), but the fact that DRM is embedded in all those cards has long bothered me. SD cards are probably the most widespread example of DRM – even if nobody realizes because nothing uses it.

The cards are not hard to find, so I know what I’ll be buying from now on. Sadly, their Micro SD cards appear to be of the old-fashioned kind with CPRM. Hopefully they’ll release MicroSD and MicroSDHC cards without DRM soon…

In 2009. While almost all music is available for digital download without DRM, legally, from the likes of Amazon or iTunes.

There are some baffling quotes in this article. It’s an interview with Hugh Griffiths, Head of Mobile at Microsoft UK. Here are some of my favorites:

“At the moment, to be honest with you, we don’t have the functionality in-house to provide a mechanism for transferring between mobile phones and PC. We don’t have that functionality available.”

So, Microsoft does not have the technology available to copy files. It’s really hard you know, what with all those zeros and ones you have to keep track of.

“Q: Can you really expect people to buy music that’s locked to a device they upgrade every 12 to 18 months? A: I didn’t realise phones were churning that quickly in the marketplace these days.”

This is Hugh Griffiths talking, the Head of Mobile at Microsoft UK. You’d expect him to perhaps know a few basic facts about the customers he’s targetting?

If this guy is representative for the average Microsoft employee, I’m not surprised that they are laying off thousands.

So, you can buy music from Amazon or iTunes that you can copy to any device, without limits. Or you can buy music from MSN Mobile music service that can only be played on the phone you download it to, and that you loose when you upgrade your phone. Oh, and it’s about twice as expensive as the uncrippled version of the music.

I’m going to hazard a guess that this service is not going to be a huge success.

I’m sure the producers are happy that all those people who speak Dutch and don’t live in Europe will now have to wait until the DVD comes out for their region, which will happen in approximately a million years, three days and 15 seconds. In other words, never.

There are probably fewer than a few hundred thousand Dutch speakers that don’t live in Europe (barring similar languages like Afrikaans). Given the limited usefulness of the DVD to folks who do not understand Dutch, what exactly is that region encoding for?

While there are still many services with DRM out there, the de-activation of the ‘plays for sure’ system illustrates the core problem with DRM very clearly – somebody else holds the keys to your DRM’d music/movies/books. If they decide you can’t use them anymore – for whatever reason – your media become unusable.

Even those people who don’t know or don’t care about DRM will now think twice, particularly if they are burned by ‘plays for sure’.

Ergo, DRM is dead.

DRM’s funeral – the zuneral – was held this evening in Cambridge, MA. About 20 people attended the tasteful ceremony that ended with the submersion of the deceased in the Charles.

A plaque was revealed on the Weeks bridge to commemorate the event:

DRM is dead, rejoice!

More info about the death of DRM will become available on http://drmisdeadtome.org shortly. Check out my zuneral photos or all zuneral photos on flickr.

Wonderful news, indeed.

That’s it for music, now on to video

Well, Warner has joined the MP3-selling party, which makes Sony-BMG the lone holdout. But Warner and Universal are not selling their music without DRM on the iTunes music store – that’s the labels trying to reign in Apple’s market share in digital music sales a bit. I would not put my money on the labels in that fight, not with the track record of their management…