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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?"
In this case, Apple is C). And, it's very very hard to say they have a 'monopoly' position, especially coming from a RECORD LABEL.
If said RECORD LABEL wants the monopoly to end, they should maybe consider the (literally) hundreds of companies willing to get into the online music distribution business. After all, a RECORD LABEL would have the power to license songs to any other business they choose.
This is absurd. If Apple has a monopoly, it's because the RECORD LABELS gave it to them. This is called playing both sides against the middle.
Well, it depends on where the market lies...
Is it in players?
Is it in content?
Is it in distribution?
See, with players they're already licensing the iPod to HP and Motorola.
In content they already have indies as well as major bands.
In distribution they have iTMS for Windows, Mac, and soon Motorola.
If they license Fairplay, that means other people's content is allowed on the network; it also means other people can create their own networks, and it means other people can create their own players!
However if Apple licenses FP in such a way to generate network effects... I would expect Apple to license FP for other players, and maintain control over content and distribution!
GPL Deconstructed
Virgin claims that Apple is abusing a "dominant" position by not licensing its own DRM.
But "dominant" is not really applcable yet. Are they dominant in music sales overall? No way. Are they dominant in being able to play music you buy online? Not even that is true, since the percentage of PC's is so much larger than Macs.
Perhaps at some distant point, when online music sales erally exceed physical CD sales (if ever?) then Apple might be called "dominant". In this case it's like a black hole calling the kettle black.
There is even an out if they REALLY want to sell music that can play on an iPod - MP3. Just because that format lacks technological features they would like, does that really give them cause to proclaim Apple is a monopoly that should be forced to share?
It will be interesting to see what the courts make of it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
because PlayFair already cracked it and will allow us to unlock what we've purchased. The main site's taken down, but you can just google "playfair-0.5.0" or the like.
.m4a as well as .m4p files (as long as you have iTunes installed)
Or just burn to CD and re-encode, but who wants to waste cd's and time doing that?
There are also already plugins for Winamp that will play both
apple might be having some trepidation about cloning.
jobs is probably very aware that mac clones nearly killed apple. that's why he killed them when he was brought back on board.
however, with the iPod having lots more share of its market than the macintosh, i think apple has less to worry about if they can get a decent sum from fairplay.
if they can't make a lot of money by licensing fairplay, they do have a lot to lose. itms won't be selling to ipods exclusively anymore, and itms doesn't have the same high margin as the ipod.
"Just use the User-Agent Switcher, works for me."
Terrible advice IMHO. The more that other browsers identify as IE, the less likely these lazy designers will ever catch a clue. Do the world a favor and send them an e-mail explaining why you won't be back instead. It might not get through to them, but acquiescing definitely won't.
Just my 40% of a nickel...
"A revolution without dancing is... a revolution not worth having"
And isn't that the point in licensing it for other players? Get revenue in licensing and network effects, while minimising manufacturing costs?
GPL Deconstructed
Apple has just as much as a monopoly on FairPlay as Nike has on Air Jordans. That is, they have a monopoly on a product, not a monopoly on the music player/music store market. By revenue, Apple has a 55 percent market share for mp3 players. By units, only 31 percent. I don't know how much of a market share iTunes has, but FairPlay songs are only able to be played on 31 percent of mp3 players. Good luck crying monopoly in court on a company whose market share isn't even close to a majority.
They do have competitors, and those competitors are obliged to compete. If they can't, tough.
Virgin is just plain wrong. Forcing Apple to open FairPlay would be a miscarige of justice, there is no good reason to do it other than to stick it to Apple because other companies are mad they aren't as successfull.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Right, they haven't licensed the iPod to HP, and they haven't licensed iTunes for Motorola's cell phones, right?
GPL Deconstructed
The site apparently isn't Windows only -- on a Mac running FireFox and Safari, I get:
Pour surfer sur ce site depuis un Mac vous devez utiliser Internet Explorer 5.2 et supérieur, comme navigateur.
IE has to be one of the absolute worst browsers available for Mac OS X. It's slow, looks terrible, and was the very first thing I deleted from my PowerBook.
The truly galling part is they recommend I use IE 5.2 or better. And I am -- FireFox is better.
So let me get this straight. They don't support Apple Mac OS X users using the default OS X browser (Safari), but they want access to Apple's DRM technology Apple originally created to service the same people who use OS X and Safari. Uh-huh.
Methinks VirginMega needs to fix their own support for Apple before they worry about Apple supporting them.
Yaz.
No, they never will. At least they won't if they value their company, their products, their income, and the people who support all that. The Apple clone market was a resounding fuckup. That idiot CEO should be flogged for what he did. He caused an absolute nightmare for support. People didn't call Epson or Umax for tech support. Oh no. They saw the Apple logo and called Apple for support. The Umax and Epson clones were the worst of the lot. At an Apple Service Center I worked at we had racks of dead Epson and Umax clones. They couldn't be fixed. The companies refused to honor the warranties. They were POSs. DayStar and Power Computing did a pretty damned good job of making clones (especially the SMP DayStar boxes) but that still didn't fix the support issue. The Radius machines were also junk. The clone "experiment" was far and away a horrible fuckup that we all should hope never happens again.
And it wasn't Jean that licensed the OS and CHRP platform to the cloners. It was Spindler.
"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?"
What it WILL be, is a perfect reason for Virgin to buy up Real -- who recently reverse-engineered FairPlay -- as a new outlet for Virgin's catalogue, bypassing Apple.
Why will players be profitless?
Right now there is plenty of competition in the player market. Many players have the same storage capacities as the Ipod, and are cheaper than the ipod.
The storage of the ipod has nothing to do with the profits!
The design of the ipod (and itunes) has everything to do with the profits.
If the FairPlay DRM is opened up for music stores, wouldn't also be possible for hardware manufacturers to then adopt it for their hardware? That would allow 3rd party devices to use iTunes Music Store and be one less advantage that the iPod would have.