“First announced last week, online music service MP3tunes has officially launched. The service offers 300,000 songs, initially, and plans to add more in the coming months. The service does not utilize digital rights management (DRM) to limit song sharing. Although this might make MP3tunes a target of future litigation, founder Michael Robertson is ready for a fight, if it comes to that,” Elizabeth Millard reports for NewsFactor Network.
“‘The courts have said file sharing is not illegal,’ he told NewsFactor. ‘So we’re simply exercising our legal right to give consumers what we think they might want.’ The main argument underpinning MP3tunes’ refusal to use DRM is that with services such as iTunes, consumers are ‘renting’ the music, rather than buying it. ‘If you buy a CD, you can do what you want,’ said Robertson. ‘You can loan it to friends, or put it on different computers. But with these current music services, you just get to borrow the music.’ That is limiting to consumers, Robertson said. ‘If you pay for something, it should be yours,’ he added,” Millard reports.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Huh? iTunes customers are buying their music, not renting it. Maybe Robertson meant Napster To Go or some other subscription service? Still, shouldn’t he know exactly what iTunes Music Store (iTMS) offers if he plans to compete with Apple? For the record, from Apple’s iTunes Music Store web page: “The iTunes Music Store lets you quickly find, purchase and download the music you want for just 99¢ per song. You can burn individual songs onto an unlimited number of CDs for your personal use, listen to songs on an unlimited number of iPods and play songs on up to five Macintosh computers or Windows PCs. And the iTunes software works so smoothly on both platforms that you can share music with any combination of Macs and Windows PCs on a local area network — regardless of whether you’re running iTunes on a Mac or PC.” More info about iTMS here.