ARTS & FARCES internet

That’s it for digital rights management (DRM). Microsoft has announced it will begin selling DRM-free music files online. This is a 180-degree turn for Microsoft which had previously maintained that DRM was a prerequisite for digital media business models and that Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ call for abandonment of DRM was “naive and irresponsible.”

What’s especially interesting in this is that Microsoft, in an e-mail to IDG News Service, said the company “has been talking to other record labels ‘for some time now’ about offering unprotected music….”

Did you hear that? That was the sound of the other shoe dropping.

Seven years ago when my kidneys failed, I had a nasty fight with sepsis, a sometimes lethal blood infection and the leading cause of death in non-coronary intensive care units in the United States. I almost lost.

Now comes news of a new study indicating that statins—the drugs millions of people take for high cholesterol—may lower the risk of sepsis in dialysis patients.

A Johns Hopkins team studied 1,041 dialysis patients over a 10 year period:

“‘Those taking statins had a 41 in a 1,000 chance of being hospitalized for sepsis, while the other group not taking statins had a 110 out of 1,000 risk. Although the overall absolute risk is relatively small, the statin group’s risk is dramatically lower,’ says Rajesh Gupta M.D., the study’s lead author, who was a senior medical resident at Hopkins when the study was conducted.”

One of the co-morbidities of kidney failure is a severely suppressed immune system. While the Johns Hopkins researchers aren’t sure why statins reduce the sepsis risk, it is known that statins have an effect on the immune system. Researchers hypothesize that either the statins may regulate the immune system’s response to infection or the compounds fight microrganisms directly.

Bright and early yesterday morning, the planet’s third largest record label, EMI, announced that it would begin selling music without digital rights management (DRM). Apple’s iTunes store will be the first online retailer for the copy-protection-free EMI music files, but other vendors are expected to sell the DRM-free music files “within the coming weeks.”

In addition to stripping DRM from its music files, EMI will also distribute its music files encoded at a higher bit rate, resulting in better music quality. No one yet knows for sure what bit rate will be used, but the EMI media release says “EMI’s retailers will be offered downloads of tracks and albums in the DRM-free audio format of their choice in a variety of bit rates up to CD quality.” This could—hypothetically—mean that some retailers may offer music files in the .flac lossless file format, which would almost certainly prove to be real competition to Apple’s iTunes store. If, and only if, customers educate themselves.

The DRM-free music is being positioned as a premium product at a price point that’s about 30 percent higher than the DRM-encumbered versions. EMI Group CEO, Eric Nicoli referred to internal EMI tests in which higher-quality, DRM-free files outsold lower-quality, copy-protected files by a factor of 10.

The big question remains: will the other major record labels follow EMI’s lead and universally drop DRM. I think it’s inevitable; the real question is how soon. At any rate, make no mistake. This is all about EMI and not Apple or Steve Jobs. After all, Jobs is Disney’s biggest shareholder and could remove the DRM shackles from all Disney media pretty dang close to overnight. Don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen. He’s going to be dragged into this kicking and screaming just like the others, his open letter notwithstanding.

Dialysis patients who take aspirin have a 54 percent lower risk of Staph infection according to a recent study that examined more than 4,700 blood cultures from 872 dialysis patients. The optimal dose, according to the study run by Dr. Martin Sedlacek from Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, is 325 mg daily.

Unfortunately, aspirin was found to have no effect on infections caused by other microbes.

Payola isn’t just for the recording industry anymore. Minnesota is the first state to require pharmaceutical companies to disclose payments to doctors. And, according to a New York Times report by Gardiner Harris and Janet Roberts, that disclosre is telling:

“The Minnesota records begin in 1997. From then through 2005, drug makers paid more than 5,500 doctors, nurses and other health care workers in the state at least $57 million. Another $40 million went to clinics, research centers and other organizations. More than 20 percent of the state’s licensed physicians received money. The median payment per consultant was $1,000; more than 100 people received more than $100,000.”

For dialysis patients, the big pharma payola is especially troubling. Dr. Allan Collins is president of the National Kidney Foundation. He’s also the director of a kidney disease research center and he’s on the faculty of the University of Minnesota. According to Harris and Roberts’s report, the pharmaceutical company Amgen—manufacturer of epogen, the anti-anemia drug—“underwrote more than US1.9 million worth of research and education programs led by Dr. Collins.” Three years later, National Kidney Foundation—of which Collins is president—issued anemia guidelines that heavily favored drug industry positions.