Slashdot Mirror
Apple Not Too Harmonious with Real
An anonymous reader writes "As if in answer to the question previously asked on Slashdot, CNN Money is reporting that Apple isn't all that happy that Real pried open the door to the iPod for its RealMedia files. "We are stunned that RealNetworks has adopted the tactics and ethics of a hacker to break into the iPod." It should be interesting to see how this pans out in court, and if the DeCSS case serves as some sort of precedent."
This is silly. Previously, the iPod would play any MP3 or AAC (or WAV, or Audible - not sure if it handled any other formats) you stuck on there, assuming that if you HAD bought it from the itunes store you had also authorized the ipod. I should know - I have yet to buy more than three songs from iTMS, yet my 30 gig iPod is all but full.
This flies in the face of science.
For the thousandth time, APPLE IS NOT A CONVICTED MONOPOLY. The rules change significantly when you're a monopoly with near 100% market share.
Be the Ultimate Ninja! Play Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN today!
iPod plays Mp3s, AACs, AIFFs, and a number of other formats. They're not transcoded before the hit iPod. The iPod disk has a normal filesystem on it and all, so you can look for yourself.
Also, AAC doesn't inherently have DRM in it. Apple just wraps it in DRM for the songs they sell from their music store. I rip my music to AAC using iTunes and it is totally unencumbered by DRM.
Heck, AAC wasn't even around (at least, not the way it is now) when the iPod first came out...
Oh ya... another article over at DesignTechnica with the full Apple statement and other stuff.
Uh, no.
The iPod plays mp3s. It has an mp3 decoder chip. In fact, they didn't play AACs until some time after they were announced (two years?).
Converting mp3 to AAC would be destructive and silly. Where did you hear this?
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
"Now Apple is stealing Open Source technology [...]"
Yeah! Just checkout the latest info on bash 3.0. It seems that "Several bug fixes for POSIX compliance came in from Apple; their assistance is appreciated." How about that? AC, being a world class shell scripter, you must surely appreciate this help.
dani++
If Microsoft is a monopoly, Apple is surely a failed attempt at one. Apple has a long history of intentionally breaking their products so that they will not inter-operate with other products.
Remember back when Jean-Louis Gassée held up a telephone when asked how to make Macs and PC's work together on the same network? Apple not only wasn't interested in having Macs inter-operate with PC's on a LAN, they were openly hostile to the idea.
Anyone else remember the voodoo one had to go through to get a standard SCSI hard drive or CDROM drive to work in a Mac? Remember the bullshit that Apple tried to spout when asked about this? They tried to say that SCSI was an electrical standard and not an interface standard. Yeah, right. The truth of course was that their partitioning tools and CDROM drivers were specifically written to check for a tag in the drive's firmware and fail if that tag was not found.
Any company that is going to play keep-away like that will NEVER receive a dime from me.
It's this kind of snobbish nonesense that really made me dislike Apple, regardless of what the company used to be like back in the Apple II days.
This is why I won't buy an Ipod. That and the whole bullshit issue with the batteries not being replacable. I hear they've fixed that now, but it never should have been an issue in the first place.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Typing this on my 17" Powerbook and listening to my 3G iPod...
Apple is being lame.
Why do companies fight so hard to keep from reaching more customers and giving them what they want? Apple says they want to grow market share but they aren't doing a very good job. They spend a substantial portion of their energy preventing customers from doing what they want. Not that this is uncommon. But it's still stupid.
And to all the apologists -- the DMCA is a destructive law and anyone who uses it is playing games with your freedom. Grow up: you can love the good things a company does and still hate the bad things a company does.
I love Apple's OS and hardware, and I think their business practices suck. As long as people defend them for this stuff they'll keep shooting themselves in the foot. Give Apple a little tough love, eh?
Cheers.
Give it a rest! Apple rocks!
Karma Schmarma
Yes, I do have to stand on my head to convert purchased (DRM'd) songs to MP3, but I am not locked out. Or in. Whatever.
you can't fault Apple for using a law on the books - passed by Congress (unanimously [loc.gov] by the Senate), and signed into law by President Clinton - to protect its own business interests. If you don't like the DMCA, or aspects of copyright law in general, work to change the law(s), but don't fault companies or individuals for conducting themselves within the bounds
Of course you can. Before the DMCA was written, reverse engineering for interoperability was common, and legal. After the DMCA was written, guess what, it's still legal, in fact the text of the DMCA makes this explicitly legal. The authors of the DMCA were very careful to make sure that this kind of activity was legal. So of course we can take apple to task for trying to use the DMCA to prevent something even the authors knew was important.
Given the text of the DMCA, we can also take apple to task for the exact same kind of uncompetitive activity that we always complain about with Microsoft. In this case, starting a lawsuit for no good reason (since real isn't breaking any law) just to make trouble for their competition.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Does anyone remember when Real sued Streambox in 1999 for reverse engineering their products? I won't feel one bit sorry for them if they lose this case...
Guess what, Real uses AAC same as... lets see... who else uses AAC.
Hmm. Only apple uses 128kb/s Real uses 192kb/s.
Ask me the question again?
The clone issue was completely separate though, and including it here dilutes your argument. Here's why:
The cloners were taking away from Apple's revenue when they promised to go after non-Apple markets.
While this sounds a bit silly, all the clone makers said they would be expanding market share for the good of the platform. Instead, they took Apple's hardware designs, tweaked them a bit, and then sold them at a lower price than Apple was selling it's Macs for.
Oh, I know; it's competition, and Apple should compete. Except for one thing: They were paying for the R&D for their competition. They were developing the motherboards, the OS, the peripherals, etc.
They were already reporting big losses every quarter, lowering their margins would not have helped, and Apple would have died; taking all the cloners with it.
Did you ever see a cloner advertise in any computer magazine that wasn't Mac-oriented? I didn't, and I had a job scanning computer magazines for articles about clients at the time.
They did not hold up their end of the deal, and they were strangling Apple. For Apple to survive, the cloners had to go. They made a business decision, and executed it. If they would have not made this decision with the market forces of the time, the shareholders would have been well-advised to fire every board member and executive officer in the company for lack of due diligence.
And just to beat you to the punch, I'm not some Apple shill. I actually bought one of the clones, and it runs Linux today as a router. I have Windows boxes, I have Linux boxes, and I have a Powerbook. Use the right tool for the right job, and don't ever EVER close your mind to new (or perhaps old) things.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
When the question is "why" the answer is ALWAYS money. Since it's not sales money (though perhaps they believe they will start to make money if sales continue and less competition will accelerate that timetable) it's likely support money, and although I oppose DMCA action I can see their point here.
If Real's after the fact authorizations screw up, say, 0.5% of the iPods out there in a way that requires a support call, thats 3,000,000 * .005 = 15,000 calls. Even if Apple tells every one of those people "tough break, it's your own damned fault" that's still 15,000 calls times however many minutes each call averages.
All of which misses the big problem for Apple which is that an unsatisfactory experience with an Apple product reflects, for most consumers, on Apple. Even if It Is All Real's Fault. Hell, they might not even have the guts to tell people to FOAD if they screw up their iPods - the beating they took over their idiotic battery policy is probably still fresh in their minds.
Bad management trumps ideology - Show the world you want better leadership. http://www.timefornewmanagement.com
That makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately, it makes too much sense for it to be legal these days. If Real officially "decrypted" or "reverse engineered" anything to get this hack working (like, say, a BIOS), then Apple can wave the spectre of the DMCA at them, as the article mentions. In fact, I'd say Apple has a decent shot of winning, and a great shot of using the threat of litigation to beat Real into submission.
I mean, Christ on a crutch, it's a pretty simple device... Not like every electronics company hasn't already made something similar. It shouldn't be too difficult at all to make something iPod compatible.
There you go being all logical again. You're going to have to work on that if you want to improve your grasp of the current American legal system. ;)
As a bit of an aside, how much more evidence will it take to convince Congress that no, really, the DMCA is completely anticompetitive? We have printer cartridges, DVD's, PS2 mod chips, this...what next? Is the entire concept of competition for aftermarket support a myth these days?
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
I noticed this too and sent a note to cnn money about an hour ago and it appears they changed the text. It now reads:
"Real's Harmony creates an issue for Apple because previously iPod only accepted legally-downloaded songs from its own music store iTunes. Those legally-downloaded songs are encrypted, but iPod also plays un-encrypted music files that may have been illegally downloaded."
So it's still kind of oddly worded and not totally accurate (the ONLY thing it played in the beginning was unrestricted mp3's), but at least now it mentions that it plays unrestricted files as well.
Joseph?
iPod supports WAV, MP3, AAC and AIFF. FLAC and OGG would be nice, as would the radio. Though I must admit most other players offer me properiety WMV or ATRAC, insted of AAC with 'Fairplay'. Its one devil or the other.
AAC is to MPEG 4, what MP3 is to MPEG 1 & 2, see my post, just not the Fairplay part.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
No, this arguements as rediculous as the RIAA's.
MPAA is not seen by anybody as responsible for the quality of linux code, and they certianly never answer tech support calls. Apple is most certainly seen as responsible for the stability and quality of the iPod. Additionally, since most users do not see the iPod as a minature computer, they likely don't comprehend that loading a hack like this could cause them no end of trouble, wheras just about every linux user understands the risks associated with testing out new code on their system.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
People seem to be touching on the most obvious parts of the issue between Apple and Real, but i think one needs to take a step back and look at the whole picture to get a real idea of whats going on.
Apple creates iPod/iTunes, probably one of the nicest pieces of tech made in recent times, kudos to them for that. When the RIAA lashes out at the huge P2P music swapping situation, Apple sees the opportunity for an online music store that can drive iPod sales, and put some much needed cash in their pocket. Steve-O manages to negotiate some rather amazing terms from the big 5 record companies to make iTMS a reality. Noone expects the iPod to become the phenomenon it has become, and now other players are scrambling to get on the bandwagon before it leaves the station.
Apple, Microsoft, and Real have been in a media format war for a number of years now. Each of them has a personal interest in being the dominant format b/c they are betting that one day the majority of conventional media will be carried on the net and that obviously means huge licensing fees for them. Microsoft bets that its windows dominance will secure its piece of the pie. Real is so hungry and defensive of their prospective piece they are willing use some dirty tactics to keep alive, thus giving them a bad name, making them even more paranoid. Apple, having long time connections with entertainment, plays that card by making Quicktime a production standard and marketing its quality.
Now Apple has the iPod/iTMS trojan horse, a real coup in the battle for media dominance, that noone really expected. Not only is Apple leading the online music market and in a position to get the best content from the Big-5 and indies in europe, but each iPod they sell ensures a Quicktime installation. They have a relatively loose DRM on their music which allows decent usage by consumers while keeping the very Paranoid RIAA happy, a key to the content Apple is selling. MS and Real are fully aware of these facts and are rather unhappy, that Apple has managed to not only create a viable market and secure the keys to that market for themselves, but also shoehorn Quicktime into the whole thing under their noses. Apple playing goody-two shoes with the entertainment industry this way is a real threat to their designs on the online video/film/tv industry that are betting will soon follow, now that music has shown itself as being viable.
So Real, desperate as it is, decided to jump on Apples bandwagon, cause they sure as hell arent getting in bed with MS, their loathed enemy. They ask Apple to license FairPlay to them, and Apple, knowing Real is not of any great significance anymore, ignores them. Why would they license their DRM, it could potentially add more Real Players on computers, which goes against their plans anyway. Real then does something increadibly stupid and threatens to get in bed with MS if Apple doesnt license Fairplay, and totally but Real on Apple's shitlist permanently.
Realizing their blunder, and not willing to face extinction, they decide to get really sneaky. They know Fairplay is a pretty loose DRM and easy enough to circumvent because Independent programmers had already done so. So they reverse engineer Fairplay without Apple's knowledge and announce Harmony, their last best chance to stay a player. They also ride the consumer choice ticket in their announcement, hoping to gain supporters from consumer groups and anti-corporation types, despite the fact that if they had the chance they would crush other formats in a hearbeat to secure themselves. But this isnt enough for Real...and this leads to blunder number 2. The fact that they reverse engineered FairPlay is probably not so important to Apple, the fact that they mean to license Harmony IS.
Now one could argue that thats not such a bad thing, that means that Real and its licensees can put out iPod compatible music, and Apple is just being closed and rotten for responding they way they have. But there is alot more at stake than music selection, and consumer ch
...lack of compatibility with different fileformats...
.WMA files, or Real's shitty DRM'd garbage. Most people will just shrug it off and say, "Well, I get my un-drm'd music from kazaa/emule/ftp for free anyway, so why should I care?"
It plays MP3's and that's all that most people use anyway. No large amount of people are going to be turned off to the iPod because it can't play Napster2.0 DRM'd
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org