Apple is selling music without DRM via iTunes and Danni.com – one of the bigger adult websites online – has quietly removed DRM from the videos in its members section.

The effects of this could be significant. The adult market is notoriously fond of trends and will follow Danni.com’s lead as soon as enough time has passed to be sure it’s profitable.

It will be.

The DRM fantasy is that DRM prevents content from being copied and distributed without authorization. An argument slightly less convincing than a speech by Paris Hilton at a ‘True Love Waits’ event if you’ve ever visited a file sharing site. If DRM was transparent and unrestrictive it would be a curiosity, but in practice is stops users for enjoying what they buy. For example, I buy DRM’d magazines online and have great difficulty moving them between my various computers. If I was trying to pirate the content I could do so by taking screengrabs and then compiling them into PDF’s. Obviously I’m not going to spend the time doing that for my own convenience but a pirate will. Thus the DRM effectively restricts paying customers like me, and does nothing to dissuade copyright abusers.

Windows Media DRM, the flavor Danni.com and the rest of the jizz bizz most often use, is clunky and almost impossible to work with on a Mac, so while adopting it gave Danni.com a false sense of security, it cost them the thousands of members who canceled due to problems viewing video. The decision to remove DRM means Danni.com will lose fewer subscribers and that’s money straight to the bottom line. That’s why whatever happens with their free to copy content, they’ll still be richer without DRM than with it.

Danni.com’s lead will cause most of the other large adult sites who’ve made DRM part of their offering reconsider how much they’re prepared to spend on security measures which only foil the least capable downloaders. I suspect it won’t be much.

Popularity: 32% [?]

Whatever the subject of a pod, or video, cast, music is part of the polish which helps make things sound professional. The problem is, with every piece of recorded music in the Western world owned by one of five companies, staying legal is a problem. However tempting it is to drop a few bars of ‘Girls on Film’ into your show, it can get you barred from iTunes and perhaps worse, reveal that you’re a cheesy bastard.

You can make your own music with GarageBand (if you’re a Mac User… God knows what if you’re on a PC. They don’t come with music software. A paper and comb?) but let’s face it – if you had musical talent you’d be in a band. Ergo – you will only embarrass yourself, and need to rely on professionals for your tunes. Assuming you don’t have any money to pay a composer (even one who’s also a barman and you found on Craigslist) where can you go?

• Archive.org – this website is a vast repository of public domain works (not everything there is in the public domain, so be careful). You can download public domain media from any decade and use it how you like. Unfortunately, everyone in podcasting knows about Archive.org so finding clips no one else has used is getting difficult.
• MP3 Blogs – A few of these exist, sharing music which they’ve already cleared with record companies for online distribution. It’s a little grey but, if the blog’s distributing the music with permission, and you’re doing the same in your podcast, you’re actually helping the record company in its distribution and no one’s going to be upset. Of course, this is only true if the blog is being run legitimately. These ones are: Fluxblog, Music (for Robots), Molly O’Poverty’s Guide to (mostly) free music and SissorKick. Staccato is a podcast which does the same thing. Again be careful – if the blog only has rights to share the songs for a limited time, you’ll also have to abide by those rules to stay legal.
• Record Companies – Some forward thinking record companies, notably Sub Pop, have started making music available online, for free, as a promotional tool (Genius! Just like radio 80 years ago!) Sub Pop offer a great selection (kids I remember this band called Nirvana from before you were born…) If you know when you plan to use it, you could probably get away with using one of iTunes ‘Free music Tuesday’ songs, if you only make it available in the same week they post it.
• Pro Music Mags – For anyone reading this and yawning, this is where you wake up. British magazines have been giving away CD’s (and now DVD’s) for over a decade. On pro music magazines these discs contains samples, songs (which you probably can’t use) and loops. The loops, normally ranging from 4-32 bars, are professionally composed and played chunks of music, aimed at DJ’s and composers. They’re perfect music beds for podcasts, legal to use, and right now – I seem to be the only person who’s gone public about them. When loops are sold to musicians the prices start at hundreds of dollars, rising to cars and planes if you want Pharrell to do his thing. For the cost of a magazine (about $8) you can pick up a few royalty free loops for your show that will sound better than most un-signed bands, and won’t be as ubiquitous as the best Creative Commons stuff. Titles to look for are Future Music, Computer Music and Sound on Sound (Sound on Sound doesn’t have a DVD every issue though.)

(NB: If you want to help victims of Hurricane Katrina, SpectraSonics are selling 50 downloadable drum loops for $25 and donating all their profit to Habitat.org, who are rebuilding homes for victims.)

Popularity: 20% [?]

If you run a website that publishes images you’ll have experienced having them ‘borrowed’ by other websites for reasons ranging from friendly cross-promotion to outright theft.

Some of you will have asked other webmasters to remove images without success, some may have considered suing, and a few might have hired the Luigi brothers to ’say-it-with-a-dead-pet’ and been surprised at how effective that can be.

Content is worth money and it’s amazing how many people don’t know how to use the copyright office to provide ‘real’ protection of their material at extremely low cost.

This guy (a photographer who successfully sued a client who used his photos outside the scope of their agreement – courtesy of PDN Online, which I read so you don’t have to.) won his case because every 90 days he registers his shots with the copyright office. You should too.

Popularity: 19% [?]