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.

Comments

Pudge?!

[krel]

And no mention noting what Real and Apple are really fighting over: who gets to profit from the destruction of the users' freedom.

Ah come on now, that's kind of unfair, isn't it?

Re:Pudge?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah come on now, that's kind of unfair, isn't it?

It's worse than unfair. It's the sort of gross, intentional mischaracterization that makes Slashdot look to outsiders like a pack of rabid dogs.

I fully understand why folks get all up in arms about DRM. There are certainly issues of monopoly, consumer protection, fair use, and fair trade to deal with. But know this: 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.

If I write a song, I have every right to charge $100 for giving you the right to listen to it. Indeed, I have every right to charge you $100 for the right to listen to it just once! You have exactly the same rights regarding any song you might create. We each also have the right to protect our own works against copyright infringement. Importantly, protecting our own works (via commercial license, GPL, Doberman Pinscher, or electric fence) does not destroy a right or freedom that anyone else enjoyed.

This is an important thing for the FOSS community to understand deeply, because we generally release stuff under the GPL or similar license, and we fully expect people to abide by that license. The GPL's teeth come from our legal IP infrastructure. To reject the notion of the legitimacy of intellectual property is to reject the foundation of the GPL.

Apple and Real are fighting because Real has just peed in Apple's very nice, private, swimming pool.

Re:Pudge?!

[patheticloser]

Actually, we do have fair use rights that pertain to songs you might create, even if you'd like to charge us $100 for one listening (hypothetically, of course). The battleground is where the lines are drawn and where your copyright ends and my fair use rights begin.

For example, if you charge me $100 to listen to your song once, but then I parody your song, that is my fair use right, and you should not be able to drag me to court to use your song in this way without payment.

As far as Apple pissing on Real, let's not forget that iTunes and iPod can play non-DRM content like mp3, so it is disingenuous for Real to complain too loudly that Apple's system is closed.

Re:Pudge?!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Actually

[Some guy named Chris]

Rather than portray anyone as a villian, I thought the article did a good job of explaining why the DMCA is so bad, and why we shouldn't endorse government sanctioned monopolies of ideas.

Particularly I thought comparing software interoperability to knock off razor blades effective.

Re:Big suprise

[presearch]

-3 Uninformed

AAC is not the same thing as the the FairPlay DRM layer.
Also, it's not toooo difficult to change the default encoder to one of several that Apple supplies (for free with iTunes).

You're probably voting for Dubya too I bet.

-1 Flamebait

[Anonymous Codger]

I wish I could moderate Pudge's comment. It deserves a nice big Flamebait.

Yes, DRM sucks. But we wouldn't have the iTunes Music Store without it. Do you really think that the labels would have allowed Apple to provide downloads of their music without some form of DRM?

Why can't people see what Real is really trying?

[Paradox]

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.

Re:Why can't people see what Real is really trying

[jht]

I figure it this way: If Real wants to put their music on the iPod, they're free to sell their songs in one of two formats that are guaranteed compatible:

- Unprotected MP3 files
- Unprotected AAC files

All Real has to do is that simple action, and not only will the songs transfer just fine, but users could even use iTunes to manage them! How transparent is that?

What? You say Real wants to just wrap their DRM with Apple's DRM? Oh well, never mind. Screw them.

Apple's built a closed ecosystem, but one that supports both major consumer desktop platforms, and can support externally-created files. So I really don't see a problem here. If you want to have totally unencumbered files, you can either buy CDs and rip them (because all the iTunes encoders are DRM-free), or buy them online from Apple - if you choose to do that, though, you pay a little less and get DRM-encumbered tracks that are not quite as good as a real CD would provide.

Of course, then you can run those tracks through Hymn, but that's besides the point.

-1 Uninformed Opinion

[GeorgeH]

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.

Hmmm,

[Anonymous Coward]

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 of Microsoft either, who obviously must have got the 90% market share they deserve by embracing interoperability!

What exactly is positive about it?

[Paradox]

Nobody thinks that Real is defending anything but its own interest. Nevertheless, despite that greedy motivation, what they are doing here is positive.

What exactly is positive? Real isn't campaigning to open the format. They're campaigning for their corporation to be let in on a slice of the pie.

I wonder how they will look like in the future when they will sue some hacker's ass because they have broken their stream format to make a free player (as in speech).

Umm... why do they need to do any such thing? You could open "Lispy-named's Music Store" right now. You could put MP3s and AACs on there.

The DRM only gets put on for purchased music. It is not intrisic to the iPod. The iPod is already open to competition. Feel free to make a service that sells music for it.

What's happening here is that Real wants to force Apple to support Real's DRM and proprietarty format. No one in the open source world stands to gain anything from this.

Author misses the point.

[catwh0re]

After reading the article, I feel the author had missed the point on why there is a problem at all.
From his perspective it's just about apple clamping out another provider from supplying DRM songs.
Missing entirely on why people purchase iPods over competitor products. Likewise, why they purchase simple across the board DRM from iTMS, instead of more complicated, often per-song DRM from competitors.

Now follow that with the fact that Apple has an obligation to the record companies, probably promising sales to allow the 99c licensing price, this can't be threatened by 3rd parties trying to bolster their own market share, Apple have to answer to record companies, and must from that already defend their strategy to them. (Real, despite selling the same product, have made no attempt to allow iTMS's greater library of music to play on their players. -That- would be more choice.)

Probably the most important topic which the author missed was that Apple under no circumstance should be looking through their products to 'keep open' the technological backdoor that Real has made into the iPod. Apple should not have to engineer it's constantly updating firmware to support a 3rd party who reveals no details on how they broke into the iPod (other than "using publicy available information").
My point being, when the iPod gets updated (and future versions which already come with new firmware), Apple may even without deliberate direction 'break' the hack which Real has engineered to let their DRM'd songs play on the iPod.

Real has placed itself in a dangerous position of defensive catch up, if i purchased discount songs from Real (Something I can't do on my mac computers as Real's service is Windows only, Real vs Choice.) and my iPod would play them for a short while until i updated my iPod (to do things like work with a belkin photo reader or Voice recorder, or the new one-click shuffle feature), then I'm going to be angry with Real for providing a poor avenue to get their music on the iPod, not for Apple for continuing their product developement.

Real would always be playing catch up, with every round of iterations invalidating the previous round of music downloaded. No one is going to throw away their iPod and buy a portable real player, simply because it plays $10 worth of real's music.

In short the iPod presents enough choice for consumers, it plays raw audio in AIFF or WAV format and DRMless MP3 music files, if any of these competitors were worth their salt, they'd produce a DRM free file which the iPod would happily play. As well as most other players, with exception to Sony's offering which only plays ATRAC.)

Speaking of Interoperability

[Slur]

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.