Richard Bullwinkle is Macrovision’s Chief Evangelist. You remember Macrovision, right? If not, allow us to refresh your memory:
Back in February, Macrovision — In Love With DRM Since 1983 — posted a response from CEO Fred Amoroso to Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ open letter calling for DRM-free music which was subsequently translated from Assholian into English by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber. Some bits:
• We’ve been helping and encouraging the entertainment industry to annoy its paying customers for more than 20 years.
• Remember those squiggly lines when you tried copying a commercial VHS tape? You can thank us for that.
• We recognize that if getting rid of DRM works for the music industry, it’s going to open the eyes of executives in other fields, and it could unravel Macrovision’s entire business.
• I have, to date, succeeded in convincing the entertainment industry that DRM can stop piracy.
• The solution is more DRM. DRM everywhere.
• Without DRM we don’t have control over what people can do with their media.
Read Gruber’s full translation – highly recommended – here.
Anyway, CNET (who else?) has published a piece by Macrovision’s Chief Evangelist, Richard Bullwinkle, in which he disingenuously sets himself up as “an Apple fanboy.”
Bullwinkle, conniving corporate mouthpiece that he is, then proceeds to excrete nuggets such as, “If I step outside my fanboy shoes, perhaps I would discover [that} I could buy and own songs and videos that I could use on any player…not just an iPod. I could have an open environment to share my media content across my other entertainment devices instead of a closed environment that locks all my content in one brand.”
MacDailyNews Take: Set yourself up as an “Apple fanboy” in order to push your corporate agenda with incorrect and/or misleading propaganda. Lovely. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you, too! The fact is that Apple CEO Steve Jobs has called for an end to music DRM and this is BAD for Macrovision which is obviously a place that gives Microsoft a serious run for its money when it comes to lack of business (and just plain human) ethics. Bullwinkle, who’s not fooling anybody, seems like just the type who’d take that as a compliment. Nasty piece of work. How some of these scumbags sleep at night is beyond us. Apple, of course, sells DRM-free music from EMI and is reportedly continuing to work to convince the other music cartels to allow them to do the same with their music catalogs. Such music can be played on any player that supports the successor to MP3, the superior “MPEG-4 Audio,” also known as AAC. Apple’s iPod does not require use of the iTunes Store. Apple’s iTunes Store does not require use of an iPod. Apple supports both Mac users and Windows PC sufferers. Microsoft, for example, does no such thing. Apple’s FairPlay DRM, when required by the music cartels, supports more users than Microsoft’s now-defunct PlaysForSure and bound-for-defunctness Zune thing, both of which were/are Windows-only. Zune and PlaysForSure were even incompatible with each other!
Bullwinkle, who, with one article, now makes us picture a weasel instead of a cartoon moose, continues his indefensible, slimy, and gross douchebaggery via CNET (of course) in his full piece, Think Before You Click™, here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Since_IIci” for the heads up.]
Yuck. Does anyone have any Pepto?