“The market dominance of Apple’s iPod music player is causing ever more restrictive digital rights management (DRM) technologies, argued Cory Doctorow, a fellow with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.,” Tom Sanders reports for vnunet.com. “He pointed out that Apple is looking to prevent users switching from iPods to competing devices by making sure that music from the iTunes music store plays only on the iPod. ‘Apple [turns] every iTune you buy into a 99 cent price tag on switching from Apple to a competitor’s product,’ Doctorow told delegates. ‘If you start with an iPod and you want to move to a Creative product and you have spent $50 on music, that’s a $50 investment that you abandon.'”
“Apple’s competitors meanwhile are pushing for even more restrictive DRM in an effort to entice content owners such as movie studios and record labels to sign exclusive content licensing deals. By offering to further tighten DRM restrictions, such companies are playing to the content industry’s fears of new technologies and piracy. They also bank on the content owners’ troublesome relationship with Apple which has shown little willingness to raise download prices,” Sanders reports.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Personally, we blame Apple for the high price of pancakes at IHOP while patiently explaining that you should just BURN A DRM-FREE AUDIO CD of your Apple iTunes Music Store songs if you unfortunately suffer brain damage and find that you want dump your iPod for a “Creative” device. Whoops, there goes the whole “lock-in” argument. Sorry, Cory. FairPlay lets you to play your music on up to five computers (and enjoy unlimited synching with iPods), allows unlimited CD burning for individual songs and lets you burn CDs of specific playlists up to 7 times each. Change the order of the songs in that playlist and you get 7 more CD burns. Again, the audio CDs your burn with iTunes are DRM-free. And only iTunes supports both Mac and Windows PC users. The online outfits that sell songs for the also-ran devices like those from “Creative,” are Windows-only. Mac users need not apply. That seems just a bit more restrictive than Apple’s solution to us.
Now, get a load of this:
“Doctorow’s keynote presentation focused on how iPod users lose any investment they have made in MP3 content if they ditch the iPod and move over to another provider such as Creative,” Mark Chillingworth writes for IWRBlog (Information World Review, part of vnu.net europe) in an article that’s inexplicably headlined “Apple actions damage Podcasts.”
“Apple is potentially damaging the growth of MP3 as a content medium. It may have made digital audio content fashionable with its iPod device, but if it divides the market into segments the medium will fail to flourish. If any company should know this, its Apple,” Chillingworth writes. “Apple made personal computers a reality, only to lock out software developers and hand a massive advantage to Bill Gates and Microsoft. Apple is now a minority computer for social outcasts instead of the de facto standard it could have been.”
Chillingworth writes, “Apple’s behaviour is a concern to content producers, owners and information professionals looking to increase access to their information using MP3. Although, if history follows its previous path, Apple will slip into oblivion again for acting this way.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Mr. Chillingworth seems not to know what a podcast is or what Apple has done to foster the medium. It has nothing whatsoever to do with what Doctorow is whining about above. Mr. Chillingworth also seems to have no idea about the difference between MP3 and the FairPlay-protected AAC files that Apple sells via iTunes Music Store. And how the heck did Apple “lock out software developers?” Sheesh.
The Macintosh platform required and still requires huge investments by developers to create compatible software. So, when faced with budgetary contraints, they chose and still sometimes choose to go with the most popular platforms. The iPod simply plays music that can be encoded, for very little cost, in any format the “developers” (musicians and labels) desire: AAC, MP3, WMA, etc. The music doesn’t need to be rewritten, recorded, and remastered. It’s like writing Photoshop once and then pressing a button to translate it for use on Mac, Windows, Linux, etc. To draw an analogy between what happened with the Mac platform and the iPod/iTunes symbiotic relationship simply highlights the writer’s ignorance of the vast differences between the two business situations.
One last question, is being called “social outcasts” better or worse than “fanatical cultists?” Let’s ask Mr. Chillingworth: mark_chillingworth@vnu.co.uk
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Related articles:
Apple’s vs. Microsoft’s music DRM: whose solution supports more users? – August 17, 2005
The iPod is not the Mac, so stop trying to compare them – August 13, 2004
Hey Nimrod-
If you close your Apple account you can’t play your iTunes music. If you are not authorized (via Apple iTunes) as a listener you are without downloaded tunes. Check it out.
I may be a social outcast, but if so, I didn’t magically start being one when I switched to Mac.
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As for DRM, Apple’s is the least restrictive of any of the stores I have used. basically every single song had different restrictions. And if I burned a CD of them (the few I was allowed to), the restrictions came with it.
If RIAA and its ilk had their way we would not be allowed to copy any music at all, or have any other format other than Cassette or CD. (They probably would like to go back to cassette – harder for most people to put in the computers.) They are why it is still considered illegal in some countries to rip your own CDs.
Side Note-why does everyone (ok not everyone but a whole bunch of reporters etc) think that Apple owns AAC, as far as I know, they only own FairPlay.
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