My Morning Jacket and copyright

I was so annoyed yesterday at being thwarted from purchasing the new My Morning Jacket CD due to draconian DRM procedures that I wrote the band, and their manager, a terse email. Today, I received this response:

Dear Seth,

Please forgive the delay in getting back to you. As I'm sure you know that you're not the only person to have had difficulty with “Z”. That said, as the manager, I purchased a copy of the album and had no problem loading into my Itunes and putting it on my ipod.....I too am a Macintosh user.

That said, My Morning Jacket in no way endorses the use of the “Draconian” measure and share in your displeasure.

Also, if you were to go to the “News Page” of the website, you'll see that we posted a couple of 'by passes' to the copy protection annoyance. It seems to have worked for a lot of fans.

If you do indeed purchase a copy of the album and have difficulty loading into your itunes, email Jamie [redacted] and we'll send you a burn of the album. You can also purchase the album on itunes as well.

It pains us to know that this copy control stuff is inhibiting some fans from enjoying the music....because that's what it's all about to us...the music.

Thanks for taking the time to reach out to us and we hope that we can of assistance.

Kind Regards,

Mike
My Morning Jacket's Manager

Hmm, artists who don't support their label's DRM decision? Or more precisely, their label's parent corporation's DRM policies? Who woulda' thunk it? I guess I can buy the album after all.

Update 4: 48, Bo Koster adds:

Hey Seth,

This was not our doing, it was not something we wanted, and we had no power to stop it. If it were up to us, obviously it wouldn't be there. We're sorry. Know that there is a weird fight between Apple and the record companies about itunes dominating the online sales market, and that we (MMJ and you the fan) are being used as pawns in this scuffle.

You can check our website in the “forum section” for ways around the copy protection, usually its people with PCs who have trouble not, MACs. I have a mac and didn't have any trouble for example, so you should be able to get around it and put it on your ipod.

Peace Out,

Bo

which reminded me, I blogged about this last spring: Sony Hates the iPod, also Piracy My Ass It's an Attack on the iPod.

I still have such a small number of Fairlplay songs on my computer (again, mostly freebies from Apple every Tuesday) as I did last May. Out of the 35901 songs currently in my iTunes library, only 161 have copyright restrictions (0.448%, to be exact). The rest are in the freely available MP3 format. MP3 isn't an 'open source', if I recall correctly, but it certainly doesn't have COPY/CONTENT RESTRICTED labels on it!

Update, one more email from Bo Koster

...glad to see you are reasonable in your response. MMJ is very grateful for the compassion and understanding almost all the fans have had regarding this. Seriously, it's been pretty amazing. Like I said, let's hope that this is the last time. It's not fun playing shows and having everyone say they love your record and music, when every time you open your email there are messages from those same people, only now they are pissed off people who only want to support what you do. Don't get me started on globalization, and corporatate domination and culture and society, because we'd be emailing for months.

Thanks again and take it sleazy,

Tags: DRM, /music, /My_Morning_Jacket, /Open_source