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BusinessWeek on Opening Apple's iTunes DRM
hype7 writes "BusinessWeek is running a very interesting story on Apple's foray into music, with a different bent to everyone else's. BW suggests that, instead of opening the iPod up to the world, Apple should instead license its DRM - 'Fairplay' - to anyone who wants to start up a music store. The upside is obvious: it would mean that Apple's music format, AAC, would become ubiquitous; Apple could quite feasibly make money on licensing fees (say 1 cent per song sold); and, it would just happen to stick it to Microsoft and the Windows Media Format. As the iTunes Music Store isn't running at a profit (or forecast to make a big one), having the Music Store clones eat into Apple's existing market share wouldn't be a problem; all these stores would be doing is building a bigger potential market for the iPod."
For the nth time, AAC is not "Apple's DRM technology." It is part of the MPEG-4 specifications. More info here.. To quote:
AAC was developed by the MPEG group that includes Dolby, Fraunhofer (FhG), AT&T, Sony, and Nokia--companies that have also been involved in the development of audio codecs such as MP3 and AC3 (also known as Dolby Digital). The AAC codec in QuickTime 6 builds upon new, state-of-the art signal processing technology from Dolby Laboratories and brings true variable bit rate (VBR) audio encoding to QuickTime.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
On the other hand, Microsoft's WMA is proprietary no matter how you slice it.
It doesnt say that AAC is Apples DRM.. it says that Apples DRM is called 'Fairplay' and licensing that to others would increase usage of the AAC FORMAT.
Fire in the hands of the village idiot is no tool, but a weapon of mass destruction
That's not Apple's decision to make, since they aren't the owners of AAC. And they're apparently smart enough at least to know that, unlike, say, you.
You're a little defensive about your manliness there buddy, I don't have to choose a certain electronics device to reassure myself that people will think I'm straight.
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
Having clones to Apple hardware is one thing and I can understand Steve killing that idea but this is so totally different. Steve readily admits that iTMS is not a breadwinner. But Steve is a just a bit too protective still to license FairPlay.
...but they already did license the hardware for the iPod to HP. Seems like it would be a lot easier to license out the DRM tech than the precious iPod.
Maybe partying will help...
An online store that wants to sell to iPod users merely has to provide the music in MP3 or unprotected AAC, since the iPod will accept both of those as well as Fairplay-protected AAC. You'd probably have to provide your own client to buy the music, and then use the scripting interface for iTunes to load it onto the iPod.
AAC is not "open source" You still have to pay to license it.
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
AAC is proprietary. You must purchase patent licensing if you want to legally use the format.
Cheatsheet for this article:
AAC -- must licence from MPEG
WMA -- must licence from Microsoft.
MS DRM -- must licence from Microsoft.
Apple FairPlay -- can't licence from anyone.
So, please, let's quit pissing-n-moaning about "proprietary" -- this is all business.
Just so you all know, Winamp, being the awesomely versatile player it is, CAN play AAC songs with Fairplay DRM attached, with this convenient plug-in. Of course, there are many limitations still, but that's proprietary DRM for you.
You can chart and discuss the plug-in's progress here. The older, "officially released" version of the plug-in with brief descriptions and reviews is here.
BTW, Winamp 5.03 is already out, in case you weren't informed.
If you send an email to iTunes Support, and ask them nicely, they will de-authorize all the computers on your account automatically. Just tell them you no longer have the computers you authorized and cannot de-authorize them the normal way.
Worked for me.
But Steve is a just a bit too protective still to license FairPlay.
There is precedent for Apple successfully licensing something of this nature: Firewire.
Most albums with more than 10 songs on them are $10.
*snerk* Yeah, Apple sure has suffered lately under their boneheaded, non-visionary leadership.
Hell, if they get any worse, their competitors are going to have to start going out of business just to keep from humiliating Apple...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
All hail FatWallet:
Here are some legal (in Russia!) MP3 download sites - most flat fee:
allofmp3.com
This site is locally legit and songs can be downloaded for as little as $0.01 per MB. That's around 3 cents per song.
DELit
Unusual emphasis on hard rock and metal acts (east European and Russian youth apparently worship metal acts)
3MP3.ru
$4.55 per month for unlimited downloads.
And you are not stuck with the typical iTMS low-quality 128Kbit file. Most of the Russian sites let you choose your quality and give you the option to do "online encoding" where you can select the settings you want. When the pop up screen shows up you can hit switch to advanced mode toward the bottm and you get the following options:
You can choose between the LAME or BLADE codec and 128, 160, 192, 256, and 320 kbps for each (constant bitrate). Or you can choose LAME variable bitrate at 128, 160, 192, or 256.
If you enjoy these services, 3MP3 should be your first stop to see if you can find what you are looking for at the lowest price. Then I'd move to allofmp3, followed by clubmp3.ru, and then DELit.
Cue the "In SOVIET RUSSIA" trolls now...
Da Blog
The only reason iTunes has DRM in the first place is because the major labels insist on it: they like their paying customers to have more restrictions than the folks that are getting it for free, makes sense right?
I love that logic. I think Apple's DRM is the least odious of what's out there, but it's still too restrictive for me. Adding any arbitrary constraints just seems so... ludicrous in terms of the customer's ability to enjoy the product.
I stick with Emusic, b/c the price is reasonable (40/month / $10/month -> $0.25 per song), and there are no DRMs (just MP3s of decent quality). Of course, you've never heard of most of the artists (with a few notable exceptions- George Carlin comes to mind), but there's a lot of good stuff there. I don't widely share what I download- why would I bother when it's available at a reasonable price?
In terms of $, I currently spend much more at Emusic than I do for any other source of music, and am reasonably happy with it.
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
Otherwise he never would have said this:
I like microcars
Um, no. AAC is a lossy format. If you burn it to CD, then rip it and re-AAC it, you get something not quite as good as the original.
And really, 99c for a song isn't even that great of a deal. That makes a 15 song cd = $15.
When you visit iTMS you will see that most albums having more than 10 tracks have prices capped at $9.99. Yes, there are counterexamples (Kitaro's "An Ancient Journey" is $18.81, the aggregate cost of the individual tracks), but they strike me as quite rare. I noticed a few albums are actually less than $9.99, and those have 9 or fewer tracks.
So, FYI, your blanket statement "That makes a 15 song CD = $15" is far more often incorrect than correct.
Every rule has an exception (except this one).
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Nope. How about you let me handle this:
Note1: as you can see, Alex Salkelver at Business Week clearly didn't do his homework before writing that article.
Note2: the folks at Veridisc are astonishingly incompetent at e-business: they own neither veridisc.com (unrenewed, squatted, not work-safe) nor fairplay.com (unowned, parked)
...or Rendezvous.
mbbac
And who invented IEEE 1394? A bunch of Apple engineers.
It's a standard that was submitted to IEEE, yes... but it is a standard that was submitted by Apple Computer, who invented it.
There's also the trivial exercise of using iTunes to burn a CD then re-ripping the music. Of course the music has then been lossily encoded twice, with different encoders, so it's sorta like listening to a copy of a tape of a FM broadcast.
You haven't done this before, have you? The sound quality is lower, but it's not *that bad*. I would compare the original to CD quality and the re-ripped / twice-encoded version to FM radio quality (and really, no worse than most of the less common pirated MP3s floating around in cyberspace).
Here's what I noticed about the quality difference:
I started off with a song bought via iTunes... sounds great via my iPod and via the stereo connected to my PC. I burnt a playlist of my songs to CD. I then ripped the songs back into iTunes, encoding as 192kbps AAC. Playing back the song, it sounded just as good as the original... or so it seemed to me at first. I then played the original.... a-hah!... in a back-to-back comparison, the original sounds much better... but its not something you will really notice otherwise.
All the rest of the comment aside, since I don't feel like getting into an OS jihad -- every OS has its strong and weak points, and will have people who argue against it solely on emotional reasons -- you nonetheless make a mistake which has been made very often lately.
:)
/not/ propriety. It stands for 'Advanced Audio Coding,' and is part of the MPEG-4 specification. It is an open standard, with an ISO document and everything; it's basically the successor to MP3, from the MPEG working group. AAC is no more 'associated with Quicktime' simply because Quicktime can play it than MP3 is 'associated with Nullsoft' simply because WinAmp plays MP3. (For that matter, Quicktime plays MP3s, and WinAmp can play AAC.)
/not/ an open standard, but it /is/ licensed from somewhere else, part of a suite called Fairplay and Veridisc, which about 5 minutes of poking around on the web informed me could be licensed from Circle Group Internet, Veridisc's parent company. It looks like Fairplay is designed to wrap /any/ digital audio -- be it AAC, Ogg Vorbis, MP3, whatever -- and as if anyone who wants can license it.
You ask 'where are open standards when you need them?' The answer is, right where you're pointing.
AAC is
Now, admittedly, the DRM which Apple uses is
The reason some folks (including me) happen to like Apple is that they've been very supportive of open standards. Their nifty 'Rendezvous' discovery protocol is simply an implementation of the open 'zeroconf' protocol. Their iChat video and audio chat are based all on completely open standards which anyone can implement if they wish (though it does use AIM for the initial negotiation, alas). Etc.
--Rachel
The incentive is that the songs would play on other devices... The drm would be open, the songs could be on any device, or software audio player that supported the drm.
"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" - Albert Einstein
Oh yeah, AAC won the listening test over here too : http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/9217
/. at great length. If you look at the "winners", you will see that none of them "won" by a greater margin than their inherent error bars or confidence measures. Therefore it is incorrect and unsupported to say that any particular codec "won". Have you ever taken elementary stats?
You know these particular "results" were discussed recently in
Da Blog
I just wanted to add that Apple did more than implement ZeroConf in Rendevous. They played a major part in developing Zeroconf.
I've also written to the CEO of Veridisc, Gregory Halpern, with some questions about Fairplay. I'll post to slashdot if I get a reply.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.