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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.