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% [?]

AVN reports MySpace is building tools which will allow parents to identify their children online. While currently kids are anonymous, MySpace is going to remove that right for minors in the name of safety.

I don’t see the smart in this. If tools exist which allow people to identify the real name, age and location of kids on MySpace, guess who’s going to be most interested in using it?

Hasn’t Fox learned anything from the ongoing destruction of all DRM by dedicated hackers? Any tool which can be abused will be. I can’t think of anything likely to cause more harm to vulnerable children than a way of knowing with certainty their personal data.

As for the possibility for parental abuse of access to data assumed private, that’s a whole other Springer Show.

Popularity: 67% [?]

Just over a week ago I reviewed the digital edition of Playboy magazine. I was fairly critical of the technology used, and soon heard from Dave Zinman at Zinio who kindly answered a few of the questions I had about his product.

My opinion’s not changed regarding the digital edition, but I certainly have a better understanding of what Zinio offers publishers of (adult) content. As magazines become more digital, and blogs offer more content that competes with print, these new ways of doing business are doubtless going to inspire, and effect, the way websites and digital publishers make money.

In the interest of balance, here follow the questions I asked, and the answers Dave gave exactly as they took place (you can read my thoughts on Playboy Digital here):

Sam Sugar: Is Zinio designed for publishers or readers, and what does it offer each group?

Dave Zinman: Zinio has offerings for publishers and readers, but is primarily designed to meet the needs of readers.  If we don’t have something that readers want, then we won’t have much to offer publishers.

Through Zinio, readers can get access to magazines they know and love, with a digital advantage.  Digital magazine subscriptions eliminate the 6-8 week waiting period experienced with print.  Each issue arrives immediately, and is delivered to your computer regardless of where you are.

International readers can finally get access to cross-border publications without paying through the nose for delivery and waiting weeks to get their issues. Digital magazines are archived on your computer for ready access and searchable for quick reference. Digital

magazines can incorporate multimedia to create a much more dynamic experience than print. Zinio offers the ability to bookmark, highlight and take notes while reading publications. Finally, digital magazines are printed on zero stock paper, so they are 100% sustainable technology.

Publishers use Zinio to create new revenue streams by building up new paying subscribers. They can also experience dramatic savings by eliminating the printer and post office. They can also launch new editions much less expensively, promoting experimentation and innovation in the field.

SS: What kind of DRM does Zinio use/impose and what’s the thinking behind it?

DZ: Zinio encrypts all magazine content and forces each reader to have a license key to open a file. For obvious reasons, we don’t discuss our DRM in detail, but it is easily the most secure solution in the industry.

SS: Why use Zinio over PDF?

DZ: Zinio recreates the exact feel of a magazine by incorporating a page flip, easy zoom, tailored search, highlighting, note taking, and a My Library feature. Additionally, Zinio incorporates a delivery manager which automatically detects when the next issue is available and downloads it in the background.

SS: Can Zinio magazines be transferred between computers when upgrading?

DZ: Zinio magazines can be downloaded again by signing into your account.

SS: What are Zinio’s plans for the future?

DZ: We just launched a global network of 9 newsstands in different countries. Now by going to Zinio, anyone in the world can find magazines from a variety of countries, sold in the local language and currency at the domestic price.  This is a real breakthrough for the magazine industry.

SS: What’s the advantage to publishers of using DRM that can be defeated with a “print-screen” command?

DZ: If you do a screen grab of a page, you will just get the image at the resolution at the time of viewing. When in two page mode, the screen grab will not be very useful for sharing and reading. When in one page or reading mode, you won’t see the whole page on the screen. So using screen grab or print screen to "copy" a digital magazine is not very useful.

Of course, the protection afforded by Zinio’s DRM is not designed to prevent any image or page in the magazine from being copied or ripped. Prior to the advent of digital magazines, anyone could take the print magazine and scan in a page.

SS: The prices for digital magazine subscriptions are almost identical to print subs. Traditionally print publications use the cover price to pay for the costs of production, while their advertising provides any profit. How is such a high price for a digital magazine justified when production and distribution costs are zero?

DZ: Publishers set the prices for their magazines in print and digital form. Many publishers reduce the prices on magazines in digital form and many do not. Let me give you two examples: BusinessWeek offers an entire year, 51 issues, for $29.97 in digital form. The print price is usually around $45. They have chosen to lower price on the digital edition to drive greater use of digital.  They have also worked with Zinio for over two years and want to drive more digital subscribers. Playboy sells an annual subscription of 12 issues for $19.97 in both print and digital. They just started with Zinio and have chosen to maintain the same price for both. Given the sales results so far, they both have chosen wisely.

SS: How are digital subscriptions audited (e.g. are they being tracked by the ABC? If not – under what authority are subscriber numbers presented to advertisers?)

DZ: Digital subscriptions are measured by the audit bureaus (ABC and BPA) in the same way that print subscriptions are measured. Publishers choose how much circulation to declare on their statements to the bureaus and the bureaus do periodic audits to ensure accuracy. As part of Zinio’s service, we provide publishers with the data that is audited and work with both ABC and BPA.

Popularity: 31% [?]

Hugh Hefner (pictured right)

Anyone who works in, or enjoys the output of, the adult industry has a lot to thank Hugh Hefner for.

Now that’s over with, allow me to tell you that, Playboy Digital, Playboy’s attempt to precisely replicate their print magazine in a format which can be read on a computer, is a failure.

The Playboy system uses two pieces of proprietary software. Issues are delivered via ‘Zinio Delivery Manager’ and can then only be viewed using ‘Zinio Reader’. It’s clumsy and it’s how Zinio sell publishers the dream of ‘copy control’ – a claim which is, of course, gorgonzola shit (i.e. a bunch of crap with enormous holes in it).

DRM inaction. The photo above was taken from ‘Playboy Digital’ using my computers built in screen-capture command.

It’s a match made in hell. Software burdened with cheesy DRM (to go with the cheesy photos), tacky effects (which match Playboy’s astoundingly tacky wardrobe) and an awkward interface (reminiscent of the awkward erection I once suffered after studying the December 2000 centerfold too closely in public).

‘Digital magazines’ were the original holy grail of publishing houses, and now cheap powerful PC’s, broadband internet access and the PDF format have made ‘digital print’ easy. Publishing houses have ignored the most obvious solution in favor of ’safe’ proprietary solutions which they imagine will stop ‘theft’ and encourage ‘thieves’ to become customers.

Of course the universe in which this is true is the same one in which Hugh Hefner’s hair looks real close-up.

If Playboy want to produce a digital copy of their print magazine, they’d be wiser distributing a PDF, via RSS, on the same day the print version is published.

If they want to re-invent the magazine, they should have build a website that couples their content with multimedia in ways print can’t.

What they have produced in Playboy Digital is a lesser magazine than the print version, and a lesser digital experience than provided by their existing website (Playboy’s Cyberclub – oooh cyber! So techno!)

Playboy Digital is interesting, deeply flawed and not a bargain, given that every Playboy photoset can be seen on the web for free moments after each issue hits the streets. If you want month-old Playboys delivered to your computer for $20 a year, or can’t collect a print subscription, go-for-it. If you don’t want to wait a month to see new issues, need to view issues on more than one computer, value multimedia, or react badly to annoying page-turn effects – look elsewhere.

(NB: I am informed by Zinio that digital issues should arrive before or at the same time as print issues. It’s not happened yet for me but this might well be the case.)

Popularity: 21% [?]

This lock is more effective than 99% of DRM.

A lot of speculation’s arisen regarding Apple’s announced move to Intel processors. People are saying it’s because Intel’s new Pentium D chips have built in copy protection. A lot of mention is being made of that fact that the copy protection is in hardware and is therefore software independent. Once again people are talking about hardware copy protection as if it’s unbreakable.

Macrovision, which has been part of every VHS and DVD sold in the US for over 20 years, is hardware copy protection, as is the system that currently protects DVD’s. Both are easily circumnavigated. Anything that can be viewed on a computer has to be decoded to be displayed. Once it’s decoded it can be copied. Copy protection is therefore impossible, even in theory.

Making it hard to copy items – which is possible – will stop everyone for a while, until one person works out a way to do it, (like DVD Jon, the then 15 year old Norwegian who broke the DVD encryption algorithm) and makes it freely available to people with no technological ability at all.

Apple’s moving to Intel because the chips are fast and cool. Steve Job’s will sell the idea of hardware copy protection to Hollywood to launch his movie download service but is under no illusions about it himself. QuickTime’s never supported DRM natively, I suspect because Steve knows it can’t work.

The online adult industry has been profitably selling unprotected movie and video files for years. Is Apple the one company smart enough to follow our lead and make movie downloads as easy to copy as songs from the iTunes store?

Popularity: 22% [?]