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Financial Times on Apple/Real/DMCA Morass
drpickett writes "The Financial Times are carrying an editorial by James Boyle concerning the nascent battle between Apple and Real. Good comments on the DMCA issues. Article sort of portrays Apple as a bunch of close-system types who got the 5% market share that they deserve for shunning interoperability. No mention is made of Real as the poster child for closed formats and cheap spyware tactics." And no mention noting what Real and Apple are really fighting over: who gets to profit from the destruction of the users' freedom.
This isn't about DRM, or the DMCA, or anything of the sort. All that's businesses posturing and playing grown-up. It's expected, even if it's tedious.
What Real is trying to do is shame Apple into doing their engineering for them. Apple has a tightly coded product that sells very well, but which profit margins are smaller on.
Real comes along, figures out how to slip Harmony into Apple's current system, then complans when Apple says, "We reserve the right to break compatibility with this 3rd party, closed source product that is directly in competition with our music store."
People need to stop confusing the issues. Real wants Apple to give them something for nothing. It's a concrete effort to not break compatibility with this product, which can be measured in man-hours and engineering dollars.
And what excatly does Apple get back in return? Has Real made any effort to make Apple's job easier? If Real wants to open the iPod to their format, then they can pay Apple to do so, or offer up the engineering hours to keep everything working.
Or hey, they could open up THEIR format to Apple. Now there's a thought.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
Not "however you like" but we have certain rights. We pay money for goods and with that purchase comes the right to do certain things allowed under the fair use provisions. If you sell me a CD with your songs on it, then I have every right to make copies for my own personal use. You own the content and the distribution rights, but you don't have the right to prevent me from making copies for myself. If you sell that CD to me, no, I cannot do whatever I want, but similarly, just because you are the content owner doesn't mean you can just restrict my use however you want.
just because that's the only reason the labels let companies like apple and real sell online music, doesn't make it right. DRM serves no purpose but to inconvience the people who would never rip it off, and midly deter the ones who were considering it. for the people that want something for free and are willing to go to any length to get it, DRM is as much of a deterent as putting a sticker on the device that says "Please don't pirate music". these are the people who bootleg for money. these are the people who will always get something cracked with shere manpower and reverse engineering. it's nothign but a big game, and the media companies can never win.
- tristan
You do not have a constitutional right to use someone else's work however you like. In fact, the creator/owner of a work has a constitutional right to do whatever the hell they want with it. The sooner we all grok that, the sooner we can have an intelligent discussion on the subject.
Sorry, but it is you who lacks understanding.
Firstly, you don't have a constitutional right to do a lot of things that you have the right to do. Certain rights are protected, but it isn't an exaustive list of what you are allowed to do - it's a list of things the government is not allowed to do. The Consitution and the Bill of Rights doesn't grant rights, it recognises some as being fundamental to freedom and protects them accordingly.
Secondly, you absolutely do have the right to use a work that somebody else holds the copyrights to however you want. It is copying that is forbidden. In other words, only the copyright holder has the right to copy.
Thirdly, you lump creators, owners and copyright holders in as the same thing. They are not. If I buy music, I am the owner and I can use it however I want. It is my property. That doesn't mean I have the right to duplicate it, and it doesn't mean I am the copyright holder. Also, in music terms, the copyright holder is almost never the person that created the work.
To reject the notion of the legitimacy of intellectual property is to reject the foundation of the GPL.
Just because you fundamentally disagree with DRM does not mean that you fundamentally disagree with copyright.
I think a better question is whether Apple would have included DRM if the music labels didn't demand it. The answer is yes.
Apple is using DRM to control the marketplace, at the expense of users' rights and if it were any other company's DRM (say Circuit City with the other DIVX's or even DVDs) there would be a huge outcry.
Of course just because Apple is wrong doesn't make Real a company/adware vendor worth rooting for, but at the same time it's hard to get upset that a company is offering their product for half the price of their competition.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
Since you've listed the 'positive effects' to back up a point, how about listing those 'negative effects as well' so we have enough information to make a judgement.
What are the negative effects of Fairplay other than the knee-jerk "lulls users into giving up freedoms" or "doesn't work with my favorite OS/music player"?
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
Apple is actually very much on the ball when it comes to interoperability. They may have closed off the iPod for reasons which should be obvious, but in other areas they have gone far beyond the call of duty.
For example, by adopting Unix they have opened up a whole new arena of open source, GNU, and X-windows software that simply would not have been possible had they gone the route of 'Be' for example.
Nearly all the standards adopted for data in Mac OS X are open, which encourages further interoperability. For example, Apple's video conferencing in iChat is based on open standards, and it's entirely possible for an enterprising windows devloper to make a chat client that can communicate - via Rendezvous - with iChat.
Apple long ago dropped the kind of "not-invented-here" attitude that characterized the Apple of the 90's. Continuing to portray them as closed-off is like prefixing their name with "beleaguered" - hackneyed, worn, and outdated.
-- thinkyhead software and media
You'll notice I got moderated troll for the above reply for merely asking Pudge for the substantive negative effects of Fairplay (in particular). You'd think an editor for Slashdot could provide a little something to back up the bias found in: "And no mention noting what Real and Apple are really fighting over: who gets to profit from [Fairplay's only reason for existing] the destruction of the users' freedom." (subtextual interpretation my own)
I would argue that whether or not an mp3 player supports Fairplay is not a negative effect of said management scheme (as it is a failure of a manufacturer to license and implement it) and therefore wished to avoid those flames.
How does Fairplay destroy users' freedom?
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
The article is based on the false assumption that Apple is trying to protect its iTunes Music Store (iTMS) in itself. The idea is that the iTMS is an as-yet-untapped, but in the future huge, source of revenues, hence Apple's strong stance against Real. On the contrary, Apple sees no opportunity in making money out of digital contents, be it music of software. Its focus is on hardware and so has been for a while, to tell a long story short. True, they make great software, but only to sell (great) hardware.
As far as the iPod and Real are concerned, Apple wants to avoid, a) in the short term that Real's or somebody else's software interferes with the iPod's workings, a potential headache for Apple's customer support, and b) in the long term that Real or a third party highjacks the iPod to foster the success of an alternative to the iTMS, which in a second time -- and only then -- would turn customers away from the iPod by promoting and supporting alternative players.