PUBLIC MARKS with tags hotlinked & drm

Amazon.com, perhaps the largest internet retailer, has a system of "tagging" products on its US site. You can look at a product and add a tag that describes it. We have started tagging items that contain DRM (Blu-Ray players and DVDs, the Zune, the iPod and more) with the "defectivebydesign" tag.

The files are not encrypted with digital rights management or copy protection software. Artists are slowly migrating to distributing their own content via the internet. This seems like a great idea and should scare the RIAA more than any college student downloading a pirated song. BNL also is offering live recordings from their concert tours. An album is sold for $9.99 for mp3 and $12.99 for FLAC lossless files.

This paper discusses the failure of DRM in the developed world, where it has been in wide deployment for a decade with no benefit to artists and with substantial cost to the public and to due process, free speech and other civil society fundamentals.