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ITunes Australia Goes Live
daria42 writes "ITunes Australia has finally gone live, after more than a year of waiting. Apple is holding a press conference in Sydney this morning to officially launch the service to the media, but the store has already opened. Like the Japanese ITunes store, it looks like Sony-BMG is not participating."
The article comes up here just fine. Also, another interesting article: Apple: Our biggest competitor is P2P.
This lack of participation is a Very Bad Thing for anyone who likes to buy digital music easily online. As a consumer in Japan, I have been much-thwarted in my attempts to buy songs I hear on the radio or wherever. Though iTunes is very convenient, I haven't spent any money on iTunes Japan because it's so crippled. Obviously, I don't think this is good for either Apple or Sony-BMG, and hopefully they work something out eventually.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
But what is the user allowed to do with it once they buy it? How many devices can it be stored on?
So Sony won't allow Apple to sell their tunes library, (about a quarter of the big five's recorded music), in Japan and now Australia/New Zeland. interesting. And ABC (Disney) is the only TV network willing to sell their TV Shows, Pixar only willing to debut a few (very cool) shorts.
This is very important everyone. the content providers are VERY SCARED. First they were scared the medium wouldn't be popular enough to thwart file sharing, now they are scared it is SO POPULAR it will thwart their very role in distribution!
I for one welcome the medium - The quality of "Lost" is totally acceptable for the price and download time, actual movies should only be provided in a hgher quality though.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
New Zealanders who feel left out are apparently lying to Apple and getting songs anyway...
TRHOnline - Staggering Towards Brilliance
No, that's right - we don't have Fair Use - a vague set of conditions that are interpreted at the whim of a judge.
Instead, like the rest of the world we have Fair Dealing laws that set down your rights in black and white, and are not open to interpretation.
With Fair Use, if you're lucky you might be protected for certain uses - but there is absolutely no situation that is guaranteed to be protected - it's all up to how well you can argue it in court, most probably against a high payed entertainment industry lawyer.
With Fair Dealing, you probably won't get away with as much, but you can know 100% that you are protected if you fall within its definition.
not sure if I should post a story I wrote but what the hey, it's /.
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http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/8515A04B
with "hints" on how to circumvent the Aussie only rule. I'm sure you've already cottoned on to that.
Apple NZ head said he doesn't know if/when Apple will even launch in NZ.
I am a leaf on the wind
According to this person's research into the Terms and Conditions, it's ambiguous whether buying a track from iTunes Oz grants you any CD burning privileges or not:
So you're allowed to burn and export products; but you don't get any copyright waiver, and there's no such thing as fair use in Oz, so you're not allowed to burn or export. So ... are you allowed to burn CDs or not???
$1.69* 0.7482 (exchange rate) = 1.2645 (4dp) we pay 26% more than what Americans do for each song.
Which is where in Indies should really be pushing...
"Here Apple, have our entire catalogue for world wide distribution."
That has to make everyone happy.
The Aussie store currently doesn't have the Just For You feature, but if you go to the home page and switch to the US store using the popup menu at the bottom, it appears.
(You have to switch back if you want to buy a song later.)
I have been downloading from iTunes to Australia for well over a year, because I have a UK bank account as well as an Australian one. The choice from the UK store is probably better than the Australian offering at the moment anyway. Apple doesn't care where your IP address is from, they only check that your credit card is registered in the territory that the music store is located in. This seems to work around the regional disaster that is the record industry quite neatly. In fact, I'd say it makes a mockery of the whole regional distribution model, and really it's about time that the record industry realised that it needs to wake up and smell the coffee as far as globalisation is concerned. As for any tracks I still can't get legally? Well, there's always Acquisition...
As far as most 'pop' music goes, the songwriters and composers are in the employ of, or at least part of the machine with, the record companies, and still little or nothing to do with the perceived 'artist'.
All available data suggest that regardless of any of this, the sun will still come up tomorrow.