Another Garbage Patent

*no comment* writes "Literally "garbage patent" that is, Apple was rewarded a patent for the "Garbage" icon in Mac OS X. The patent documents can be found at the USPTO by clicking here. More on this and other Apple patents are in this article over at the macobserver."

Comments

Re:I guess MS can just use

[terrab0t]

WHAMMO~!

what the?

[dfj225]

Why the hell is this front page news?

DRM

[localman]

I was pretty excited about the Apple music service that was mentioned this morning... but this article indicates some patents on an AAC DRM technology. If they go that route, to hell with them. I don't have a single illegally acquired song on my laptop, desktop, or ipod. But if I they think I'll pay for a song if it won't work on all of my computers without any hassle whatsoever then they are terribly stupid.

I certainly hope they realize that the technology has to be _better_ than what's currently available. I can buy a used CD for $8, rip it, and never worry about compatibility. Any step backwards is going to fail.

People who are comfortable pirating are going to pirate anyways. They could care less about some stupid DRM. Those people are lost consumers as far as the record companies are concerned. Why they insist on designing safeguards into the systems that will be used exclusively by non-pirates is beyond me. It's such a waste. Their system is already more expensive than the pirate service - and they want to make it less functional too? There's a business model for you...

My prediction: if Apple uses meaningful DRM the service will fail. I can already beat their system in price performance with current tools. If they don't use DRM, they may have a hit.

Terriiific!

[Tablizer]

Employeers will now keep my resume longer!

Re:Wonderful!

[The_dev0]

Informative? Fuck. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with this post at all, but what a waste of mod points. There (I'd like to hope) will be some intelligent conversation made sooner or later on the subject and some moron has blown a mod point on this! I propose a time limit for modding, ie; comments can't be modded until either 200 comments and/or 1 hour has passed since the story was posted. It's pretty annoying to see any comment even remotely on-topic getting modded up simply because it beats the rest of the "fR1st P05Ter5!!!1!!" and AC drivel, but then when you come back to read the story later and you see there are a hell of a lot of great comments which have been left alone, you start to question the practice of giving mod points to any Tom, Dick or Harriet. Maybe you need (I don't know, um...) 20+? 30+? Karma to be eligible to mod other posts.