Sorry guys, this is going to be a rant about silly digital content protection behaviours on mobile devices.
I one of the earlier post of this year, I’ve talked about the Nokia n93 – my new splendid mobile. I still love that phone, so the rant is not about the phone itself, it’s more about the funny behaviour of a whole industry – as similar things happen with Motorola phones as well (just to name one other brand).
The story is: I was trying to transfer a midi ringtone file from my phone to my computer. As both have bluetooth…well, what could be easier than just sending it via Bluetooth? So – I launched the FileManager on the phone, selected the file and chose “send via Bluetooth” – result “Unable to send protected object”. To elaborate a bit more on that – this midi file was created by myself some years ago, there was and is no DRM on the file – nothing, nothing, nothing!
Apparently either Nokia or Vodafone think I’d appreciate the fact of being limited in what I could do with my files on my mobile, great! I understand the needs of dealing with DRM protected content, I really do. But doing it this way is just silly as the solution was to launch the Nokia PC Suite, to use the included file manager and copy the file over to the PC. I could also have copied the file on my memory card and put it into my PC – you see my point? It’s just not a real protection, it’s just a silly annoyance that wouldn’t stop people who WANT to get a particular file or media content off a phone. But locking any phone not to transfer particular types of content off a phone via i.e. Bluetooth is just silly.
A similar thing happened to my wife the other week. She’s got a new Motorola phone – could you imagine what sort of a hassle it was to just get a picture off the phone without having to send it as an MMS/PXT?
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