For some reason, I've never acquired any taste for anything
"protected" with DRM, be that video games, music, books, -
anything at all. As such, I hardly can recommend any
alternatives to resources that /do/ use DRM: I simply have no
familiarity with any of them whatsoever. Still, I guess
International Day Against DRM,
http://dayagainstdrm.org/ , is
as good reason as any for sharing pointers to resources to
obtain DRM-free files from, so here I go.
(I suppose part of the reason is that back in the 1990s when
I was learning computing, DRM hardly existed, or at least hardly
mattered at large; and when it began to spread in the 2000s,
after I was already introduced to the concept of free software
- and found it much to my liking - I decided that I have better
things to do with my time than to deal with anything that,
after a fashion, requires me to prove my good intentions.)
Two things I became interested in the 1990s are music and video
games (and video games with good music in them; for an example,
Electro Man, otherwise leaning towards being an unremarkable
platformer, was pretty well done in that regard IMO.)
By the time
http://gog.com/ started in 2008, my interest in
video games largely waned, but I felt like supporting them
regardless; and if $ lgogdownloader --list-details output is
to be believed, I now have some 286 titles in my GOG collection
- aside of a few, all Dosbox- or ScuumVM-based (or Z-machine
based, though still with a Dosbox-based interpreter bundled in.)
Some of those games I've first /downloaded/ a full decade
after purchase. (Like I've said, I have little interest in
video games these days.) I think there's still select few
that I'm yet to download for the first time, as well as other
select few that I've downloaded and have yet to actually play.
There's also
http://classicdosgames.com/ for shareware and
freeware titles (and playable demos, such as in the case of
id's Spear of Destiny.) Might also come handy for those
curious about what DOS gaming was like back in the day, but
unwilling to spend actual money on that.
Of course, I appreciate fully free games just as well, such
as OpenTTD,
http://packages.debian.org/bookworm/openttd .
Sure, /quantitatively,/ the simulation makes little sense
(a bus to the suburbs taking a week or two for a trip around),
yet /qualitatively,/ the game is surprisingly insightful.
As to music, I've been relying on CDDA for bigger names (such
as Iron Maiden), and
http://magnatune.com/ and
http://bandcamp.com/ for not-so-big ones (and /lots/ of them in the first case, given
that I've paid for my Magnatune lifetime membership back in 2011,
and thus get any updates from there I want essentially for free.)
Say, as I was starting to write this article, (a local copy
of) this track was playing in the background:
http://download.magnatune.com/all/03-Wires-One%20Sock%20Thief_nospeech.ogg (paywalled),
http://he3.magnatune.com/all/03-Wires-One%20Sock%20Thief.mp3 ("free as in free beer" copy with an ad.)
As to free (as in "free software") and freeware (as in "free
beer") music, I suppose I need to prepare a comprehensive
list at some point, but an obvious possible choice is
http://commons.wikimedia.org/ . Somewhat less obvious IMO
are
http://imslp.org/ and
http://opengameart.org/ . Say, I've
recently stumbled upon
http://opengameart.org/content/arrival-1 ,
and unless I miss some deep flaw in it, it feels on par with
the works of
http://sekondprime.bandcamp.com/ . (Then again,
it's not like I'm an expert music critic myself, so take that
with a grain of salt.)
For non-fiction,
http://en.wikipedia.org/ IME provides a good
enough summary for a sheer variety of topics that I've rarely
felt a need to go for a proper textbook at all. For things
like programming languages, standards / manuals are often
enough available (as in: downloadable) for free (e. g.,
http://ecma-international.org/ ); and for the examples of
actual usage, the existing corpus of free software /and/
http://duckduckgo.com/ searches (that in this case tend to
mostly point to the Stack Exchange pages these days) hardly
leave any ground uncovered.
When that's not enough (and that's /rare/ IME), I've been
either buying a dead tree edition, asking a friend who has
one, or going to a local library.
For fiction, I've bought a few ebooks from
http://kobo.com/ -
though a caution is needed to read the fine print stating
whether any particular item does or does not use DRM. Mostly,
though, I've been relying on
http://wikisource.org/ (for the
old, out-of-copyright works, such as those of H. P. Lovecraft),
or the likes of
http://fanfiction.net/ . My recent pick there
is the "Darth Vader: Hero of Naboo" novel. Sure, it could use
a proofreader or two (for comparison, I've only spotted a
/single/ typo, 'quit' vs. 'quite', in my copy of "Princess Holy
Aura" from Baen Books via Kobo), but I /am/ able to overlook
minor spelling and grammar flaws and enjoy a good narrative still.
Also, if you're into Russian language (or are asking for a
friend), there's
http://lib.ru/ . Can't say I'm too familiar
with the site myself, though.
Yet another resource to mention is
http://archive.org/ : it has
books, music, newspapers, radio shows, video games, - pretty
much anything. Yet again, like with Kobo, some caution is needed
as it /does/ include "streaming-only" content as well.
One thing I barely mentioned are movies, and the reason is that
I'm inclined to consider them a lost cause: some of the titles
seem to have bigger budgets than some countries, at which point
it as well might be seen as surprising that the stakeholders
resort to merely uncivil behavior (such as DRM), rather than
outright criminal (such as honest-to-goodness bloody murder.)
Feel free to check
http://gog.com/ and
http://archive.org/ for
DRM-free movies, but personally, I've decided for the time being
to rely on written prose instead. If anything, it makes up in
variety what it lacks in visuals (and my imagination seems to
do a better job covering holes in presentation rather than holes
in the plot.)
... And that'd be all for now. Thoughts?
IDAD, and where to get DRM-free files from