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Virgin Accuses Apple of Abusing Monopoly
worm eater writes "The Register reports that VirginMega (Virgin Group's online music venture in France) is asking the French antitrust authorities to force Apple to license the FairPlay DRM. If France agrees with Virgin, will this be a blessing in disguise for Apple, making their DRM format the defacto standard, or will it be the downfall of the mighty iTunes Music Store?"
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Looks like they don't want you using anything but IE to access their rather shitty site. Going in with IE, I can tell you it doesn't seem like there are any Windows-only features there that would justify not accepting other browsers; just doubtless lazy web design. Good example of a site to quote when somebody asks you for a major site that is incompatible with non-IE browsers.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Players will be a profitless commodity within two years (as soon as 2GB flash chips are cheap and readily available, you can forget about the engineering challenges that shoehorning an HD in to a small, elegant box brings). Whether or not there is any money to be made from the other two depends on whether or not the DRM model wins out against both genuinely-free and illegaly-copied music.
I think you meant to say: HYMN.
MORTAR COMBAT!
... apart from being the format of choice in almost every other online music store.
The article ignores the fact that Apple has licensed FairPlay from Veridisc. It was not created in-house. Now, they may have negotiated themselves an exclusive license for some period of time, and more power to 'em, but this is NOT "Apple imposing an Apple-proprietary standard" as some would have us believe.
"but who wants to waste cd's and time doing that"
YOu can just use CDRWs
VirginMega is a store, not a record label. Virgin Records isn't actually owned by the Virgin Group. It was sold off to EMI in 92, and V2 Records is now their record label, started in 96 after Branson's non-compete clause expired.
And, it's very very hard to say they have a 'monopoly' position, especially coming from RECORD LABEL.
VirginMega isn't a record lable. You're confusing Virgin Records, which was sold to EMI a long time ago, with the rest of the Virgin Group.
JLG left apple in 1990. Apple allowed officially-sanctioned clones for the first time in 1995, unless you count the DynaMac, which salvaged parts from existing Macs.
I don't know French law but under US law you have to abuse a monopoly position in order to get your wrist slapped (see Microsoft), simply having a monopoly does not place any burden on you. Natural monopolies are not a bad thing, if you have a superior product and the market naturally flows most of the business your way then you have been a good capatalist and produced a superior product at a price point that most of the market will bear.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Slight correction: iTunes is able to transcode WMA on Windows. iTunes on Mac OS X has no such capability.
Yaz.
how do you think their $1.99 per song pricing structure will work out?
"You may not be much safer while aboard an airliner. Anderson says the French have been accused of bugging seats in the first-class section of their airliners. Ditto for French hotel rooms frequented by executives. "
I have gas, but my car uses petrol.
How is Virgin being hurt by their current inability to use the iTunes DRM system? Since the iPod can play any mp3 file no matter where you get it from, it shouldn't be interfering with Virgin's (or anyone else's) ability to sell people digital music to play on the iPod. Right?
So, by my argument, where has Apple done anything illegal by not licensing Fairplay? Of course, French and/or EU antitrust law may have more restrictive definitions. Apple's stance may also backfire on them in the end, but that would be another example of market forces making the determination.
Actually, in the last quarter, the iTMS did post a small profit.
Also, the point isn't that FairPlay is driving sales of the iPod, but that Apple controls the total user experience of the iPod. It controls:
1) The UI & hardware of the iPod
2) The loading of music, playlist creation, etc. on the computer you use to interface with the iPod via iTunes
3) The online purchasing of music for use on your iPod
Apple, as they usually do, wants to have total control over all of those factors. It's the same damned thing they do with their OS & Hardware combo and their retail experience. They want to control everything, not because they're control freaks, but because "if you want it done right, do it yourself".
---------The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
Well, it has always been and will always be players... I chatted with the MTV CEO about why they don't enter the music distribution business, considering that they already have the relationships in place. And then he brought me down to earth. How much do you think does apple earn from selling one song? About 20-30 cents. The rest goes to music companies and artists. So how many songs do you have to sell in order to make 50 million dollars, an amount which is fairly trivial actually for these companies. The answer is around 250 million... so there is no way that a company can make a lot of money here.. in fact apple pissed off a lot of people by carging 99 cents per song, because they set the industry standard, which no one can deviate from now.
What's under yellowstone?
Actually, the major problem was that the clone makers (particularly PowerComputing) were starting to produce better hardware at lower prices than Apple could offer. Everyone jumped ship from Apple to PowerComputing due to the lower prices and higher-quality hardware.
To this day, I still regard the Power Tower Pro as the best Mac ever produced.
8==8 Bones 8==8
You are wrong on your other two points too. iPod isn't what I'd call a niche, and record stores still sell orders of magnitude more than online music sites.
The case here is a little more complicated.
."
Exactly my point. It is very far from clear cut which is why you can't call it a "monopolistic tactic" without major qualifications and equivications. Two further counterpoints. One, last I heard, one in three mp3 players sold was an iPod. Apple might currently be the most successful player, but it is wrong to claim that they have anything approaching a monopoly position (yet. I'll concede that it could happen.). Second, they're not shutting out the record industry! The record industry, in the form of the dominant cartel, the RIAA companies, has the monopoly power and ultimately controls the product.
Protocols and languages are both methods of transimitting information from one entity to another. Certainly protocols aren't NATURAL languages or human languages -they have a much smaller bredth of information that they need to be flexible enough to transmit - but the analogy is sound.
It might be a sound analogy, but it not a perfect analogy. You and I could develop a computer programming language and not publish it in the public domain, and that language would still be useful for creating effective programs. There is no law that would require us to open that language to others, either freely or for recompense. We could have a "monopoly" on that language, but it could never become a monopoly because there would always be the (very easy) possibility of lots of competition.
In your example, it sounds like the community created a new language, and the original work is not necessarily protected by copyright law when creating something new. Definitions of derivative works come into play here. If the language had been patented, the result might have been different, since patents do generally control derivative works, even new work if it is based on the patented work. Still, I don't know tha particulars.
I do think you're on a good track that deserves further thought and follow up regarding interface as being langauge-like. (And I do agree with you philosophically about patents.) May I suggest you read Roland Barthes on the topic of Semiotics and Semiology? Check out Mythologies . From the Amazon book description: "For Barthes, words and objects have in common the organized capacity to say something. .
As your argument currently stands, I find much fault. However, I do think you are on to something, maybe something larger than the current set of issues under discussion.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.