MQA is Vaporware

[Jud]

22 minutes ago, crenca said:

 

 

It must be said (again and again and again) that DRM is not limited to "copy protection measures".  In practice there are other ways (that are just as important) to "manage", by digital means, the rights of consumers.  The "freemium" model that MQA is by design is a good example.

 

So I don't have to search,  can you tell me what the "freemium" model is? 

[crenca]

32 minutes ago, Jud said:

 

So I don't have to search,  can you tell me what the "freemium" model is? 

 

In short, a software design that allows an unrestricted (and usually "free") level of access/functionality, and another "premium" level of functionality (usually at a cost, sometimes just an agreement of restricted rights on the part of the end user).  This design is inherent (and not a mere external agreement) and managed digitally by the software itself.  In a typical situation, copy protection is not part of the implementation - on the contrary copying is usually encouraged.  

 

 

[Jud]

OK.  Beside the fact that the software is managing rights,  is there anything particularly insidious about such a business model? 

[crenca]

6 minutes ago, Jud said:

OK.  Beside the fact that the software is managing rights,  is there anything particularly insidious about such a business model? 

 

Yes. When applied to a standard, which in digital is the ground on which the rest of the market rests, it is particularly insidious (monopolistic).

[mansr]

9 hours ago, Jud said:

Yes.  Secrets as against other companies and the public (consumers).

Stop it. Please. The NDA is for technology owned by MQA and disclosed to a potential licensee. Nothing more. Content rights are not part of this. Perhaps this quote makes it clearer:

 

"2. Each of the parties to this Agreement agrees that all information (hereinafter called "the Information"), including, without limitation, information and ideas, knowhow and inventions contained in any documents, drawings, presentations or other materials and information disclosed orally provided by one party (hereinafter called "the Discloser") to either of the other parties to this Agreement (hereinafter called "a Recipient") in connection with the Purpose will be subject to the provisions of clauses 3 below."

 

Yes, this is standard boilerplate NDA text. I'm not a lawyer, but I am no stranger to tech NDAs. Your interpretation is incorrect.

 

9 hours ago, Jud said:

Anything you can discuss?  (Again I don't think it matters without market power, but of course I'm curious.)  The encryption they use with their compression to obfuscate the source,  or something else?

Scroll back a year or so.

[Jud]

8 hours ago, crenca said:

 

Yes. When applied to a standard, which in digital is the ground on which the rest of the market rests, it is particularly insidious (monopolistic).

 

Well, I think we're back to market power again.  I don't hear complaints about plenty of other software sold on a tiered model. It's when that software and its proprietary basis impinge on your choice of other software - become monopolistic, as you have said - that we have a problem.  And the definition of a monopoly is an entity with undue market power.

 

In that regard, the fact that a tiered model for MQA streaming has done absolutely nothing to help Tidal,  and has arguably hurt it, is extremely significant.  That lesson won't be lost on other companies.

[mansr]

1 minute ago, Jud said:

Well, I think we're back to market power again.  I don't hear complaints about plenty of other software sold on a tiered model. It's when that software and its proprietary basis impinge on your choice of other software - become monopolistic, as you have said - that we have a problem.  And the definition of a monopoly is an entity with undue market power.

I don't have a link handy at the moment, but an MQA representative has explicitly stated that such a monopoly situation is their goal.

[Jud]

7 minutes ago, mansr said:

Stop it. Please. The NDA is for technology owned by MQA and disclosed to a potential licensee. Nothing more. Content rights are not part of this. Perhaps this quote makes it clearer:

 

"2. Each of the parties to this Agreement agrees that all information (hereinafter called "the Information"), including, without limitation, information and ideas, knowhow and inventions contained in any documents, drawings, presentations or other materials and information disclosed orally provided by one party (hereinafter called "the Discloser") to either of the other parties to this Agreement (hereinafter called "a Recipient") in connection with the Purpose will be subject to the provisions of clauses 3 below."

 

Yes, this is standard boilerplate NDA text. I'm not a lawyer, but I am no stranger to tech NDAs. Your interpretation is incorrect.

 

I specifically said I wasn't speaking about content rights now and was assuming we were discussing technology (secrets).  So rest easy.

[Jud]

1 minute ago, mansr said:

I don't have a link handy at the moment, but an MQA representative has explicitly stated that such a monopoly situation is their goal.

 

Of course it is.  How many business people start with a plan to be a segment of the market *without* significant economic power?

[mansr]

46 minutes ago, Jud said:

I specifically said I wasn't speaking about content rights now and was assuming we were discussing technology (secrets).

OK. In that context, what do you suppose "rights management" means?

[Jud]

30 minutes ago, mansr said:

OK. In that context, what do you suppose "rights management" means?

 

Yep, MQA's rights management technology/capabilities.

[mansr]

2 minutes ago, Jud said:

Yep, MQA's rights management technology/capabilities.

The ones they've been insisting don't exist. Surely if they didn't exist, they wouldn't need to be secret.

[Jud]

48 minutes ago, mansr said:

The ones they've been insisting don't exist. Surely if they didn't exist, they wouldn't need to be secret.

 

Sure, whether they are currently not being employed in MQA (which would make the statement they don't exist technically true but misleading) or they are (which would make the statement untrue).

 

Edit: I suppose the third possibility is they presently don't exist but could easily be created and employed in the future.  But I don't see any of this mattering much unless MQA is seen by consumers as attractive and thus by business as an advantage.

[Shadders]

Hi,

As has been indicated on this forum, that MQA is a black box. Can be implemented as a module or in silicon within a DAC IC.

 

The MQA system processes the incoming data feed.

 

So rights management is not whether the module exists, or has been included in the IC silicon, it relates to the input data stream, and whether you can or cannot process it.

 

Such as, if you do not have the correct code, you cannot process it. If you have the right code then you have the right to process it.

 

The code will be embedded in the MQA file/stream.

 

As an aside - this may have an alternative impact for the consumer. Maybe MQA is a leased right - if you fail to pay for the licence, then the code is updated in the stream, and turns off your decoding ability. This will of course be suicide for MQA - but, they may just want rental income from each vendor, as greed gets the better of them.

 

Regards,

Shadders.

[mansr]

11 minutes ago, Jud said:

Sure, whether they are currently not being employed in MQA (which would make the statement they don't exist technically true but misleading) or they are (which would make the statement untrue).

 

Edit: I suppose the third possibility is they presently don't exist but could easily be created and employed in the future.  But I don't see any of this mattering much unless MQA is seen by consumers as attractive and thus by business as an advantage.

It matters because this is, regardless of current deployment, part of the extended plan for MQA, and as such should it factor into any evaluation of the format.

[Jud]

7 minutes ago, mansr said:

It matters because this is, regardless of current deployment, part of the extended plan for MQA, and as such should it factor into any evaluation of the format.

 

Of course.  DRM *might* matter in regard to consumer attractiveness, though it really hasn't in the past nearly as much as price, convenience, and a significant leap in quality.  And consumer attractiveness, not the bare technological capability, is what will ultimately determine if DRM in MQA matters at all.  It should be made widely known that in return for the money an MQA consumer gets something whose effect on quality is felt by many to actually be a step backward.

[mansr]

20 minutes ago, Jud said:

DRM *might* matter in regard to consumer attractiveness, though it really hasn't in the past nearly as much as price, convenience, and a significant leap in quality.

The music industry tried to push various DRM schemes around 15 years ago. The consumers were having none of it, and they had to stop.

[Jud]

1 hour ago, mansr said:

The music industry tried to push various DRM schemes around 15 years ago. The consumers were having none of it, and they had to stop.

 

Consumers seem to like DVDs, Blu-ray, Windows, iPhones....  Far more than free (as in speech) alternatives in some cases.  The DRM schemes were put on the back of inconvenient and buggy music distribution schemes of middling to low quality perceived as far too high priced for what they offered.  When the music industry tried to frog-march consumers into accepting this sorry state of affairs by treating them as thieves and suing them, consumers rebelled. 

 

When Apple put the same music in a convenient (and if I recall correctly, proprietary at the time), less expensive format, consumers lined up for it in droves.

 

Steve Jobs arguably did more damage to the cause of RedBook or higher resolution music availability when he decided he wanted to be able to advertise "A thousand songs in your pocket" (and so went with a lossy format) than MQA ever could.  At least that will be the case if people simply tell the truth about their listening experiences with MQA. 

[maxijazz]

@Jud

Stop mixing up legal contracts, licensing agreements and right management. They are all separate matters. 

[crenca]

13 minutes ago, Jud said:

 

Consumers seem to like DVDs, Blu-ray, Windows, iPhones....  Far more than free (as in speech) alternatives in some cases.  

 

Well, it's not really this simple.  With DVD/Blu-ray, the DRM is enforced not through the encoding itself, but through an external mechanism that had to be legislated.  Consumers never "choose" it.  With Windows and iPhones and the like, DRM  is thoroughly intertwined fer sur, but these are not base level "standards" in the same way an encoding is.  Most people think of an OS as a standard, and it is in some sense, but it also rests on other standards.  Whenever Microsoft has tried too hard to enforce its own base standards (examples include IE & Office) the market or the government (or both) have rejected it.

 

Actually, @John_Atkinsoninsight that MQA is more analogous to TCP/IP is probably the best way to think about this.  What would it mean for one company or a collection to come along and control TCP/IP?  Net Neutrality is about this very thing, and in a way that is on the edge of the standard (i.e. its more of a tweak at the switching level - TCP/IP itself is not fundamentally changed, rather it is throttled/shaped by an evaluation based on the source, destination, and type of traffic).

[Jud]

11 minutes ago, maxijazz said:

@Jud

Stop mixing up legal contracts, licensing agreements and right management. They are all separate matters. 

 

The latter two are of course legal contracts. I've done copyright litigation, though it was decades ago. 

[Jud]

13 minutes ago, crenca said:

 

Well, it's not really this simple.  With DVD/Blu-ray, the DRM is enforced not through the encoding itself, but through an external mechanism that had to be legislated.  Consumers never "choose" it.  With Windows and iPhones and the like, DRM  is thoroughly intertwined fer sur, but these are not base level "standards" in the same way an encoding is.  Most people think of an OS as a standard, and it is in some sense, but it also rests on other standards.  Whenever Microsoft has tried too hard to enforce its own base standards (examples include IE & Office) the market or the government (or both) have rejected it.

 

If you think the market rejected the attempt to enforce IE and Office as standards, I have some Netscape and WordPerfect stock to sell you. And IE wasn't even Microsoft's own IP.  It was Mosaic (which became Mozilla which became Netscape) second hand through Spyglass.

[mansr]

40 minutes ago, Jud said:

The latter two are of course legal contracts. I've done copyright litigation, though it was decades ago. 

DRM is a technical mechanism for enforcement, not a legal contract. Perhaps your experience is a bit out of date.

[crenca]

52 minutes ago, Jud said:

 

If you think the market rejected the attempt to enforce IE and Office as standards, I have some Netscape and WordPerfect stock to sell you. And IE wasn't even Microsoft's own IP.  It was Mosaic (which became Mozilla which became Netscape) second hand through Spyglass.

 

Your confusing the products themselves with the underlying standards they rest on.  With IE, Microsoft once tried to enforce its own standard (a hacked up, proprietary form of HTML - the standard), they failed utterly.  IE/MS Edge today rests on the current flavor HTML.  With Office, Microsoft has been more successful with implementing its own sort-of-standard (what version of hacked up xml are we on today?), but even here they have been forced by the market to stay relevant.  I don't use Office, I use Apache Open Office even though 99% of my business partners, family and friends use MS Office and our documents are intercompatible because MS Office recognizes (has to - the market so far demands it) standards.

 

Apple might be a better example for your argument/angle - it's ecosystem is quite closed which is the primary reason I don't allow it in my house (and back when I had influence in IT I worked very hard to keep it out of the whatever corp/government ecosystem I worked in). Yet, folks from other ecosystems (MS, Android, Linux, etc.) can intercommunicate with Apple just fine as they are forced to use HTML, etc. because the market demands it.

 

A DAC is a DAC (i.e. a product), and the underlying software standard (i.e. PCM/DSD) is the standard they all rest on...

[Shadders]

4 minutes ago, mansr said:

DRM is a technical mechanism for enforcement, not a legal contract. Perhaps your experience is a bit out of date.

You mean like, before digital....

Just kidding ?