music researchers vs DRM
Posted on May 5, 2005
I never thought of this before, but DRM can cause big problems for music researchers:
One of the big problems faced by Music Information Retrieval researchers is how to get good data for MIR experiments. Even a small scale music classification experiment may require 10,000 songs. At $1 per song, that’s $10,000 just for the data for a small experiment. Experiments with larger collections (100,000 to 1,000,000 songs) become impossible.The situation is about to get even worse. Soon, we may lose all programmatic access to our music. As more digital music is sold (iTunes) or rented (napster) more of our music is wrapped up in a DRM container. The only thing we can do with such music is to play it with an authorized player. Doing anything else with the bits is forbidden. Even trying to get at the bits is forbidden thanks to the DMCA
UPDATE: I submitted this story to Boing Boing and they ran it! Even gave me a backlink too. I wonder what that will do to my visitor counts. How many people follow “thanks” links anyways?
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