[Vorbis] DRM and Ogg Vorbis ??

[J.B. Nicholson-Owens]

Ulrich wrote:
> I would like to know whether it is possible to use any DRM scheme with
> Ogg-Vorbis ?
> My idea would be to distribute music commercially and be able guarantee
> to artists that they won't be copied freely.

My advice is to recognize that no DRM scheme can "guarantee to artists that they
[the tracks] won't be copied freely".  Any such scheme only adversely affects
the people whose business you're trying to court.  You're going to be
disappointed not only because you set your standards too high (such "guarantees"
don't exist in the real world) but because you will have wasted a lot of time
and money coming to realize this.

Better to recognize that illicit copying will happen no matter what you do and
that you're better off focusing on making your legitimate customers happy by
distributing tracks without encumbrances so that they can time and space shift
anything they legally obtain from your business (as they ought to be able to do
in perpetuity).  And make a point of teaching your customers why you're treating
them the way that you do.  Magnatune does this and I think that people come to
associate that attitude with Magnatune and choose to do business with them
because of the lack of DRM, copy prevention, or any other trickery.  Engage in
copy protection -- protect the user's ability to make and use copies anywhere
they want at any time they want.  Just like I can with my audio CDs, records,
and tapes.

Finally, when I buy music I would prefer to buy a FLAC compressed from an
uncompressed recording of the artist, not some lossy-compressed variant (no
matter how high-quality the encoding).  I can make my own lossy encodings, but I
can't reconstruct the information that was lost when the lossy encoding was made.