20/20 Tough Call Part 1: Hannah Montana

20/20's "Tough Call" Episode last week had a couple of controversial segments... although I suppose that all of them might have been controversial to some people. I felt like I should comment on two of them, and since they are about two completely different subjects, I'm creating two different posts.

The first tough call I want to address is Hannah Montana. Most people who have kids above the preschool age have probably heard of her, she seems to be pretty popular. I don't know much about her myself, other than that she's on the Disney Channel and is a little over my daughter's age level still.

Miley Cyrus, AKA Hannah Montana, is the daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus, known for the once-popular crossover country song, "Achy Breaky Heart." From all I know about him, he seems to be country's equivalent to Vanilla Ice.

He took his daughter on tour with him when she was a baby, and she became interested in music, acting, and the stage. 20/20 seemed to act like it was surprising when she became so interested in acting and music and wanted to do it herself. Not too surprising, is it? People often follow in the footsteps of their parents. Our country has even had a couple father/son presidents.

20/20's reporting is intended to make the audience believe that Billy Ray Cyrus made the correct call when he let his daughter audition for television roles, and to have her own television show. I have a different take on the whole situation...

She's 14. The jury is still out on whether he made the right call.

Has 20/20 forgotten about Britney Spears already? When she was 16 (older than Miley is right now), Britney seemed to have it all together. You would have thought that her parents had made the right call too, to let her join the New Mickey Mouse Club, then later Innosense, and then to create a solo album. A lot of parents thought that she was a great role model for their daughters.

That's not really the case with Britney any longer, right? She is now another example, among dozens, of child star horror stories. She might still have a lot of money, but if you wish your children to live a happy life with a moral compass and a heart for Jesus, she's not it.

Hopefully everything will turn out great for Miley. She seems nice enough. But give it 6 or 7 more years... then we can know if Billy Ray made the right call.

Microsoft Copyright Protection Circumvented Again - Ya Think?

This morning I woke up and read that Microsoft had discovered that someone had figured out how to crack the latest copy protection scheme. Ya think? It was going to happen sooner or later, most likely sooner.

The article I linked to above talks about how they might be doing away with DRM protection overall. Something that I would be happy to see. Not that I want to find music online and steal it... I buy several songs off iTunes regularly... however, using DRM music can be quite a pain.

Usually when I buy a song off iTunes or another music service, I rerecord a copy in MP3 format anyway using Blaze Media Pro. Not because I want to steal music or anything (after all, I just purchased the music), but because music with DRM protection is not very portable. What happens if your hard drive crashes? I purchased several songs off Music Match Jukebox that get an error message whenever I try to play them now. I'm not sure why that happened, but it is pretty upsetting. I paid good money for that music and now I can't even listen to it.

I made my dh an MP3 CD to listen to in his car using iTunes... anything that I purchased off iTunes couldn't be written to an MP3 CD using the iTunes program. ??? I don't want to write a CD that can only hold 20 songs when I can create a CD with 300 songs instead. So I'm going to have to Blaze Media Pro my dh's iTunes songs so he can listen to the songs that he paid for.

People are always going to try to find ways to get free music. They have been for decades, from recording songs onto an 8 track player off the radio, to cracking the latest DRM software. Adding all the copyright protection only seems to hurt the people paying for the music to begin with. Many (perhaps most) people want to be able to obtain their music legally, as long as you let them pay for it, and give it to them in a method that is portable and easy to use. I'm glad that the move is going towards DRM free music. The people that are currently buying music probably will continue to do so.