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Comment by saulrh | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, Apple gives Steve Jobs $200million+ to make an iPad, and Microsoft certainly gives someone 200 million dollars to make Windows.next. Google gave someone $200 million to develop Android. We just don't see it as much because software doesn't depend on personalities as much.

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Yes, and Microsoft is spending billions on Bing, if Google pulled a so called Hollywood move, by making Google search a pain to use, people will start using Bing more. We don't have that with big budget films. DRM died in the music industry, in part, because a number of popular artist, like Trent of NIN were not afraid to go direct to fans without DRM.

"DRM died in the music industry"

I'm not confident that's a factual statement.

Really? I can't think of anywhere I could go to buy DRMed music right now if I tried... iTMS watermarks music files, but they're not sold DRMed music files for years. Magnatune has _never_ sold DRMed files. ihearmusic.com - no drm. All the direct from artist music I've bought in the last few years - no drm. Soundcloud or artist "Pay what you want" deals - no drm. I can't recall having purchased any "big four" owned music directly online (as opposed to via someone like Apple), but at least in _my_ little world, DRM does appear to be dead...

Doesn't Spotify use DRM? Which is not to say that it's wrong for them to use DRM on music you didn't buy -- that's a different question.

But "only used for music you don't own" isn't the same the same thing as "dead".

Ahhh yeah - all those streaming services, they seem to think Australia doesn't have the internet, or maybe just that we dont have credit cards to pay for stuff. I'd have to jump through proxied ip addresses and fiddled US billing address credit cards to even find out they're selling DRMed files...

Spotify doesn't let you own the music that you listen to though.

Netflix doesn't let you keep the movies you watch either.

Both are DRMed because thats how the company keeps you subscribing to their services.

Sansa Fuze's latest firmware update included support for something called "SlotRadio" - a bafflingly awful drmd music format.

I was skeptical as well, but it really is true. The labels gave it up years ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management#DRM_a...

Oh come on. Bing is not a serious alternative to Google. Nobody likes sloppy seconds. If anything people would start switching to duckduckgo or something, which does things much more differently.

And where does DuckDuckGo get their results from? Bing.

http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-s...

DRM died because the recording companies realized they were handing Apple a monopoly on digital distribution which would eventually make them irrelevant, the same way that Amazon and the Kindle drastically reduced book publisher influence.

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