“There’s a fun little back and forth going on between Apple and a group of programmers. Apple runs the iTunes music service, where you can download any of a gazillion songs for a buck or so,” Andrew Kantor writes for USA Today. “But those songs come with restrictions on where you can play them. So Jon Johansen, Cody Brocious, and crew (Johansen is the Norwegian who cracked the encryption on DVDs several years ago) created PyMusique — software that lets you access iTunes, pay for music, and download it without the built-in digital rights management (DRM) restrictions.”
Kantor writes, “Apple responded by closing the ‘hole’ PyMusique exploited, and requiring all iTunes users to upgrade to the latest version of the software. Johansen and the PyMusique folks responded by ‘reopening the door’ with a new version. (I am writing this on Wednesday. By the time you read this things may have changed.) To be fair, the PyMusique group said they weren’t interested in stripping the DRM, only in making iTunes available for Linux users. But the restrictions aren’t in the songs — they are added by Apple’s software. Johansen and crew simply decided not to add that feature.”
Kantor writes, “Who can blame them? By adding restrictions to music, Apple is going against decades of an understanding between music makers and music buyers. Imagine buying a music CD at the mall, bringing it home, and playing it on your stereo. Then you play it on your car’s CD player driving to work. But when you get there and pop it into the little player on your desk, you hear a voice say, ‘We’re sorry, but you are only authorized to play this disk on up to two CD players. You have now exceeded that. Thank you.’ That’s exactly how iTunes and most of the other legal online music service work. When you pay for and download a song, it comes with various built-in restrictions. Maybe you can only pay [sic] it while you’re subscribed to the service. Maybe you’re limited to playing it on certain machines. Maybe you can’t copy it to other media (say, a CD to play in your car). And people wonder why music piracy is so rampant.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Did Apple add restrictions to the music or did the record labels require Apple to do so before they would allow them to sell music online? And, by the way, Apple’s iTunes Music Store Terms of Service clearly states, “You will not access the Service by any means other than through software that is provided by Apple for accessing the Service.”
Now, we have never hit up against Apple’s iTunes DRM restrictions, because Apple’s usage rights are among the most liberal available anywhere. To introduce a touch of clarity, if you purchase songs from Apple’s iTunes Music Store: “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.” – Apple.com
Apple’s iTunes Music Store’s DRM hardly seems restrictive enough to constitute the raison d’être for rampant piracy that Kantor tries to make it out to be, does it? In fact, it seems to us that, besides Kantor, only pirates, not average music lovers, would feel restricted by Apple’s iTunes Music Store’s DRM rules.
In his full article, Kantor waxes poetically about peer-to-peer (P2P) networks that feature software that’s “simple to install and easy to use” and have “a huge ‘library’ of downloadables.” The only problem is that beyond a single sentence, “you’d be a fool not to be sure your anti-virus software was up to date,” Kantor fails to mention some information that a normal person might find important (and even up-to-date anti-virus software is, at best, one-step behind the latest viruses):
“Think you’re downloading a new song or video? Watch out–that file may be stuffed with pop-ups and adware,” Andrew Brandt and Eric Dahl report for PCWorld. “PC World has learned that some Windows Media files on peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa contain code that can spawn a string of pop-up ads and install adware. They look just like regular songs or short videos in Windows Media format, but launch ads instead of media clips.”
Brandt and Eric Dahl report, “When we ran the files, we noted over half a dozen pop-ups, some attempts to download adware onto our test PC, and an attempt to hijack our browser’s home page… Not only did we get bombarded with unwanted ads, but one of the ad windows in a video file tried to install adware onto our test PC surreptitiously, while another added items to our browser’s Favorites list and attempted to change our home page. And a window from the original music file asked to download a file called lyrics.zip, which contained the installer for 180search Assistant, commonly categorized as an adware program.”
And, besides, it’s stealing. Don’t steal music.
So, Apple’s iTunes Music Store’s DRM isn’t nearly as restrictive as Kantor would have his readers believe and certainly not valid reason for rampant piracy. And downloading files from P2P networks isn’t an idyllic panacea and might actually pollute your Windows-based personal computer with adware and, possibly, worse.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Resurrection Day comes quickly for PyMusique – March 22, 2005
The day the PyMusique died; Apple kills DVD Jon’s iTunes Music Store hack – March 21, 2005
‘PyMusique’ lets users buy songs without DRM from Apple’s iTunes Music Store– March 18, 2005
Windows Media songs and videos found to carry Windows malware payloads – December 30, 2004