“Personally I’ve never bought an iTune and I don’t own an iPod. I think Apple’s DRM is awful and represents a major step back for us all. I think those that are investing in iTune digital libraries are suckers. You are basically betting that Apple’s proprietary DRM laced format will be the standard for the rest of your life. You are paying too much for your music and tying yourself to only Apple products going forward. More innovative ways to play your music may indeed come in the future but unless they are marketed by Apple you will not likely be able to use these devices with your iTunes files due to Apple’s tight proprietary control,” Thomas Hawk writes for eHomeUpgrade. “Personally I want nothing to do with it.”
MacDailyNews Note: Apple’s iTunes lets you burn as many custom CDs as you like without DRM. You can play these music CDs anywhere. iTunes also lets you make MP3 CDs. Audio CDs play in CD players like the one in your car or home stereo. MP3 CDs play on Mac and Windows computers and in MP3-compatible car stereos and CD players. Data DVDs are great for archiving and backup, but they only work in your DVD-equipped Mac or Windows PC. If your optical drive includes a DVD burner, you can use iTunes to archive your entire music library on DVDs for safekeeping, storing the equivalent of up to 150 CDs on each DVD-R disc. More info here.
Hawk struggles onward, “So who owns the music anyway? You or them? They do. You bought nothing. You bought the right to play their song on their product. It might work today. But I’m not about to bet that this will be the format du jour 10 years from now.”
MacDailyNews Note: See our note above.
Hawk tries this one, “And if you think Apple will be opening up their proprietary format anytime soon, think again. Apple makes virtually nothing on their iTunes downloads, after paying the labels, marketing costs, bandwidth costs, etc. they make peanuts. They make a *ton* of money on the other hand on selling iPods. This was the genius deal between Steve Jobs and the hacks over at the record labels who are just as big of suckers as you are and basically have done nothing but cannibalize existing more lucrative CD sales. They were short sighted and never thought to try to get a piece of the hardware sale and now they are yammering on about raising iTunes prices on you because they are bitter dogs over the screwing that Jobs gave them.”
MacDailyNews Take: Do TV show producers get a cut of every TV sold? Do radio producers get a cut of every radio sold? Do software companies get a cut of every computer sold? So much for the idiotic argument that record labels should get a cut of every iPod sold.
For some reason, Hawk insists on continuing, “And what if you are just dying to get the latest CD from that hot new band. Again, theoretically, would it be possible to go down to Amoeba records, buy it for $14, take it home and rip it, then return it within 7 days to get 75% credit back? What’s that like $3.50 for the new CD? And with 12 songs that’s like what 29 cents a track? Hmmm… would I rather have a crystal clear high bit rate mp3 track for 29 cents or a sure to be antiquated DRM bloated track from iTunes for 99 cents? Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating piracy here, per se. But the way I see it, if Apple is going to go to war with me the consumer to lock up my music and keep it off my innovative new devices of the future, then this doesn’t really represent a valid step forward away from piracy at all.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Hawk’s not advocating piracy per se, just ripping off brick and mortar CD stores by stealing their product and driving them out of business even faster. The reason DRM exists is because of people like Hawk. Is it just us or does it seem like the biggest DRM complainers tend to be the biggest thieves? What a ridiculous article penned by someone with a total lack of understanding about iTunes, iPod, Apple’s FairPlay DRM, and how each of them works. What makes someone think that, if they’ve never bought a song from Apple’s iTunes Music Store and they don’t own an iPod, they’re qualified to critique them? Shut up, go buy your CDs, and play them on your CD player (without stealing the music and then returning the CDs). You want a legal online music service without DRM? Stop stealing, keep dreaming, then tell it to the music labels, not Apple.
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Related article:
Apple’s vs. Microsoft’s music DRM: whose solution supports more users? – August 17, 2005
The de facto standard for legal digital online music files: Apple’s protected MPEG-4 Audio (.m4p) – December 15, 2004
Do you think he really cares about what he says? Or is he just looking for a reaction?
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I woudl never have thought of the retrun the CD thingo until he mentioned it… so I guess he is promoting piracy – where are the men in black when you need them?
I do know that I was the real 1,000,000,000th download but it was a day ahead of the guy who won – so it didn’t count…
Ho Hum!
The reason I don’t buy anything from the iTMS is because of the slim selection of classical music, but mainly because the sampling rates are so low. 128 just does NOT cut it sonically.
I guess 128 is probably fine if all you’ve ever heard is your car radio and you’ve never heard unamplified instruments played in a real concert hall. Most club and pop music concert sound systems are loud, but sound awful. It’s a shame.
Anyway, I’ll continue to buy CDs and SACDs and rip my own.
“Anonymous, yes there are things that I don’t know about iTunes because I’ve admitedly never tried it. ”
A little quote from this doofus on his blog.
Maybe there should be regulation on publishing something as true even though there is no evidence. Guys like this are giving the net police more reasons to regulate.
I know, I’m gonna call myself a Medical Advisor and write blogs and articles on Cancer treatment. … just so long as it doesn’t effect my real job as a physicist.
Man, is it possible for grapes to get any more sour than this…Is it just me or does anyone else pick up a hint of donuts about this one.
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Even the title is wrong, since one billion songs does not equal one billion customers. It just gets worse, culminating in the stealing from the music store buy returning the CD for refund after ripping the tunes bit.
This guy obviously does not “buy” his music, period. Why does he care about the legal methods used by Apple? Since he steals the music, DRM is irrelevant.
You can’t “steal” music. You can steal something that the music is attached to, but you can’t steal the music itself, only copy it.
Right now everybody who levels the “it’s just like walking into a store and walking out with a CD you didn’t pay for” argument bases it around the fact that when you download an mp3, you now have something on your hard drive that you didn’t have before, something you didn’t pay for, so you must have STOLEN that mp3.
But let me ask you this: If advances in bandwidth and software make it so that you don’t actually have to download a file to your hard drive to hear any song you want to hear whenever you want it, would that still be “stealing music” since you don’t have anything left over after you listened to it? There’s no reason that somebody couldn’t create a P2P application like Limewire that instead of downloading a music file to your hard drive for you to listen later, streams the song instead, leaving nothing left over when the song is done playing. Someone will create such an app, if one doesn’t exist already. There’s no reason not to, because it already takes longer to listen to a song than it does to download one. At that point, the RIAA is going to have to convince people that they “listened to that song illegally”, since it would be hard to draw the shoplifting analogy if you don’t have any mp3s in your posession.
How do you “don’t steal music!” guys feel about that? Would you consider listening to a song without paying for it “stealing”? Is it even possible to listen to a song “illegally”? If you don’t have anything left over but the memory of hearing that song after you’ve heard it, what did you “steal”? DID you steal?
I’m really curious to know what you think about that, because that’s the direction the technology is going.
And the alternative is…what? WMA? If you are going to rant, then rant with a purpose.
I have a bunch of cassette tapes of music that I bought in the 70’s and early 80’s. I bought some of them as albums before then, and I repurchased many as CD’s afterwards. I recently found that about two-dozen of the CD’s have oxidation pits that result in popping or worse. So I’ll have to buy them again.
What the labels fear is that once I get my music in digital form, I won’t need to ever buy it again (as long as I back it up). Since iTunes came out I buy CD’s, rip them to iTunes in Apple Lossless and then store the CD. That’s the legal way to get your high-quality iTunes content without DRM.
If you don’t want to buy from iTunes, then don’t. But please shut up about it.
Apple had that in their iTunes software for sharing/streaming songs over the internet!
Morons, similar to Hawk, created software that could actually copy the songs to your location even after streaming. So, in effect, we are left with sharing only within a subnetwork!
OK, let’s see how this works.
Boss: Hey, you know we keep paying you a salary and frankly nobody seems to read anything you ever write. You better start getting some people paying attention to you quick or you can go and write reviews for the local pennysaver.
Idiot: Geez! I might be fired! I need attention and I need it fast! What can I write about to get some attention? Hmmmm….I need something intelligent and insightful and bound to get me noticed! Who am I kidding! I can’t write! I can’t believe these fools haven’t caught on to me yet! So how do I get a bunch of hits to my article quick? Ah! I know! Flame Apple! All those fanboys will be falling all over themselves to write me angry notes questioning my intelligence and sexual preferences! And I know just the thing to write about!
Five minutes later….
Boss: I see you are getting a lot of attention, way to go Johnson!
Idiot: Uh, it’s Hawk sir, like the bird.
Boss: Eh, whatever. Keep up the work Myers.
Idiot: It’s Haw…thank you sir.
Next week’s espisode: See Brown, er, Hawk write an article about the flood of Viruses infecting the Mac platform and advises people to be safe and use Windows!
” the hacks over at the record labels who are just as big of suckers as you are “
I believe Apple has a vanishingly small margin on the songs because the labels actually get a nice deal, considering their overhead on the downloads.
I still buy CDs, not because of DRM, but because of the bit rate of encoding. However, I’d rather keep the physical media than trade it in, even if I primarily use iTunes to play the encoded material.
a shameless Google bomb, please ignore
http://www.bkpfd.org
Trusted Computing is going to screw us.
MacTels users are going to find out.
http://www.lafkon.net/tc/
This guy is a troll but he’s actually right. I got suckered in for two years before I finally said enough of this crap. The recording industry insisted on DRM and now they have given up control to Apple because of it. The only way out of this mess is to drop DRM, period. If they drop their demand for DRM, Apple’s one true strength is wiped out. Now all of a sudden, other online stores are now capable of selling music to iPod owners and users of other players could then purchase from iTunes Music Store provided Apple dropped their DRM. In my opinion, people buy the iPod to use the iTunes Music store just like they buy Macs to use OS X. They write great software to get you to buy their hardware.
But why would Apple drop DRM? Don’t believe the hype that Apple did not want it. Fairplay is the lock and iTunes is the key. Apple will never drop DRM until the industry does and even then Apple would hold on to DRM as long as possible.
Think I’m wrong? Then start your own band and try to get your music on iTunes and insist that your music not have any DRM. See if Apple allows that.
Truthfully, I see a very good parallel to what happened in the PC world. Apple had a proprietary system and didn’t want to share it. The PC world was open and it eventually dominated.
Right now, Apple dominates music downloads and mp3 players. And this dominance will continue until the recording industry stops being stupid. Of course, this could mean Apple will dominate for the next 50 years.
Same crap story over and over. As stupid as my dumb ass supervisor
I hate shakespeare and I hate broadway and I hate France
Personally
I have never read shakespeare
I have never been to a show on Broadway
and
I have never been to France
but that doesn’t make my arguement any less compelling
yeah right
mdn word “like”
as in
im like an expert on these things
FUDsucker Proxy,
Thanks for proving my point. I have an issue with DRM in general, any DRM. If you are going to remove the DRM by burning and re-ripping then you are left with a lower quality recording. You might as well buy a used CD and rip it to a higher quality.
BTW,
What’s the point of buying a song with DRM if you are going to remove it anyway. In the end you wind up spending so much time on it that its not worth it.
Of course, this changes if you use jHymn to remove the fairplay DRM.
Jeff said this:
Think I’m wrong? Then start your own band and try to get your music on iTunes and insist that your music not have any DRM. See if Apple allows that.
Do you actually know this, or is this simply rhetoric on your part? If true, it makes for interesting fodder. But if simply rhetoric, make it clear next time.
If you are going to remove the DRM by burning and re-ripping then you are left with a lower quality recording
How does converting from one digital format (AAC) to another digital format (CDA) and then to another digital format (MP3) reduce the quality? It’s not like copying analog tape here, digital files can be copied endlessly without degrading their quality. As long as you’re never converting into a format with a lower sampling rate than the one you were using before, you won’t lose any quality in this process.
Written by someone who obviously doesn’t understand ANYTHING about iTunes.
D.R.M.
Dumbass
Resisting
Mechanism
My 5 year old sister has better sentence structure. Come on: “Tjhe screwing Stever gave them”??? How are people supposed to take you seriously if you type like that? (IMO, how are they supposed to take you seriously about this whole article anyway?)
~5:06pm, NewType wrote:
> Someone should fwd his article, which cynically advocates CD piracy
> (by way of plausible denial) to the RIAA, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, & Virgin.
I thought that was a great idea, so I tried to get some e-mail addresses.
http://www.riaa.com SUCKS! I can’t find any address, e-mail or real
(except webmaster); surely they must have an office somewhere! See
http://digg.com/links/RIAA_PHONE_NUMBER_202-775-0101; also
Google found “Jack Egas” <jegas@riaa.com> & <jkaraganis@riaa.com>
http://www.walmartfacts.com/talkwithus SUCKS! They only provide
a form to fill-out, which leaves you w/ no copy of what you sent.
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=cat12104&type=page
at least offers one e-mail address, <NewsCenter@bestbuy.com>
http://virgin.com/aboutvirgin/gettingintouch/contactacompany also
offers at least one e-mail address, <manager@virginmega.com>
So I sent these addresses the following short note:
—
To: <jegas@riaa.com>, <jkaraganis@riaa.com>, <NewsCenter@bestbuy.com>, <manager@virginmega.com>
Subj: eHomeUpgrade.com advocates stealing
Dear Sir or Madam,
You may want to check out the following article which advocates buying audio CDs, ripping the music off of them, and then returning the CDs to your store.
<http://www.ehomeupgrade.com/entry/2168/itunes_one_billion>
Your legal department may want to notify the author/magazine/website about the liability and ramifications of this position (making them an accessory).
Sincerely,
A Concerned Netizen
—
There may be other CD-selling companies who should drop Mr. Hawk a note, but I wasted way too much time just trying to find these…
ds.
Los Angeles, CA
ps. Thanks MDN for posting about Fortune’s “Admired” article and crediting me! I really appreciate that! =)
Why won’t Thomas Hawk kill himself?
Too lazy I guess. This ‘article’ proves that.
Why does MDN give these people an audience?
MDN, Have some discretion.
please .
Reading all of this makes one wonder why certain people like Mister Hawk thinks that there is such a thing as a free lunch. Talk about socialism at work. I guess he will never understand the concept of private property. In his world it must be all about what he can get for himself, no matter what others paid to create it. You shouldn’t profit from it seems to be his mantra. Goose to Maverick, “he was abused as a child.”
boyweho, I heard there’s a family of Jews living in the attic of Otto Frank’s office building. You might want to let the germans know about it, being the good concerned citizen you are.