Secret Notes is reporting that big record label EMI is planning to release tracks to the iTunes Store without DRM protection on them.

EMI is scheduled to make the announcement in London at a news conference that will feature Apple CEO Steve Jobs, The Wall Street Journal reports. Jobs created a stir earlier this year when he published an open letter to the music industry calling on it to abandon DRM.

We know that EMI have been eyeing up this move for quite some time and with Steve Jobs support for ditching DRM in his open letter, it appears that EMI want to try the non-DRM route.

EMI, the world’s third largest music label, has seen only mediocre success with its digital strategy, a result that some analysts believe compelled the label to take the bold move of dropping DRM. The firm had reportedly attempted to sell DRM-free music in the past but met resistance from online music stores who demanded “insurance” payments to guard against potential lost sales from the possible increase in digital piracy that DRM-free music might yield.

This is a pretty big story and a very bold move by EMI. They are the first major label to even get this far and if this does come to fruition, it has the potential to cause a chain reaction.

At very least, consumers will become aware of the fact that they will be able to buy tracks from the iTunes Store and play them on non-Apple approved devices. Once they realise this, consumers might start to demand more and more tracks without DRM, recognising the benefits of interoperability.

I’m a opposer of DRM in any shape or form, so I’m quite pleased by this development. Whether or not it will have repurcussions beyond EMI or if it will just be a small ripple we have yet to see.

UPDATE: you can listen to the audio of the announcement here.

Ars Technica is reporting that Microsoft are pushing out a new update via Windows Update to their controversial anti-piracy software, Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA).

WGA is a tool which runs on the user’s system and verifies whether Microsoft thinks the user is running and genuine, or pirated version of Windows. If it finds you’re not running what it thinks to be an illegally acquired version of Windows, it nags you via the system tray to do something about it (i.e. buy a licence). You also can’t install certain applications and updates without having successfully validated your Windows installation.

It sounds simple enough, but WGA has come under fire for privacy issues (it phones home to perform the validation) and because it kept producing a lot of false positives.

This update is supposed to reduce the number of false positives and apparently there’s a new category called ‘Not Sure’, which, as the name suggests, is the category you get put in if Microsoft have doubts about your copy’s authenticity.

While Microsoft has not responded to requests for comment, it’s quite obvious what is going on here: Microsoft has added “not sure” as a way of cutting down on the number of false positives associated with WGA. As many as one in five PCs were failing WGA checks, but this new setting should both reduce this and give Microsoft the chance to investigate further the kinds of things that are landing folks in the “not sure” category.

I think part of the problem here is that a lot of OEM copies of Windows, that is, copies bundled with and usually pre-installed on PCs, use one activation code for each batch of computers (or even a whole model). That meant that if that one key got leaked, many users would find themselves being told about their illegal copies.

Clearly, piracy is something that Microsoft have to address, but the way they are going about it in recent times has not made them many friends. This move looks to be them toning down the severity of WGA.

One thing strikes me though - how easy it would be for malware to emulate WGA’s notifications and perhaps extort sums of cash from unsuspecting users to ‘fix’ the problem. Or maybe that’s just me.

Have you been falsely marked as a pirate by WGA? What are Gizbuzz readers’ thoughts on the issue? Let us know in comments.

Steve Jobs has just posted an open letter to the world on the Apple website, talking about various issues surrounding DRM, addressing concerns about iTunes + iPod lock-in, and interestingly, saying that if they could, they would remove DRM from the iTunes Store.

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Apple are apparently feeling the heat from judgements in places like Norway, where the iTunes + iPod lock-in has been declared illegal by the Norwegian government. I think Apple see the threat here, that if one country takes out iTunes, other markets could follow suit and that could be disastrous for Apple. Therefore, if Apple manage to get rid of the DRM, then iTunes can no longer be a problem, as it won’t lock you into an iPod anymore (assuming they offer downloads in a standard format, like MP3).

Much of the concern over DRM systems has arisen in European countries. Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free. For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard. The largest, Universal, is 100% owned by Vivendi, a French company. EMI is a British company, and Sony BMG is 50% owned by Bertelsmann, a German company. Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.

This sounds like very promsing news for anyone in the anti-DRM camp (like me), and it sounds quite convincing. Clearly, from some of the statistics Mr Jobs made clear in this letter, iTunes could be selling a lot more songs than it is at the moment (only 3% of all music on iPods is bought from iTS) and I guess this is where Apple’s real motive is.

Still, it’s very good news for anti-DRM folks, and it almost looks possible that in time and with some persuasion from other big players in this business, the recording industry will realise that the downfall of DRM is inevitable.

The launch of Vista is upon us - today being the day you can get Vista off the shelf. We all should know how much money Vista will set you back by now, but security Peter Guttman is asking a different question.

Vista will have support for next-generation DVD formats HD-DVD and Blu-ray. Subsequently, this means it has the ability to decrypt content protected with the new AACS copy protection system built into the operating system.

In a nutshell, some of this copy protection allows content producers to deliberately downscale the resolution of ‘premium content’ if it’s not coming over a protected link, such as a normal DVI or VGA link to your monitor and not the new HDMI connector (with HDCP). The whole idea of this is to prevent the piracy of high definition content.

All the code to faciliate this has been built deep into the bowels of Vista, and Gutmann asks in his paper ‘A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection’ - is it worth it?

It’s a fairly technically heavy read, but it raises some very interesting points about this protection technology, and the performance and other costs of having this technology built into the OS.

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