Apple Defeats RIAA and France In Same Day

gnat writes "The subheading of the CNN article says it all: 'Four largest record companies defeated in behind-the-scenes battle to charge different prices for songs; downloads still 99 cents'. This comes the same day as France backed down on the posturing over demanding iPod interoperability." From the France article: "Apple, which did not return repeated phone calls, and other DRM holders doing business in France, are likely elated. While the law must still be voted on, the alterations in the legislation signify willingness by some in the French government to honor the rights of companies that don't wish to share their technology with competitors. Senate debate on the bill begins Thursday."

Comments

France backs down?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

*sighs*

Why didn't the submitter go with the more trollish (and lets face it, the comments will decsend to this level in a few seconds) headline the inquirer took: French committee surrenders on DRM law

Let's all remember that while we would normally blindly follow Apple's lead in this, it is a Free software issue as well as being an Apple (yay) vs France (boo) issue.

Like Microsoft (with word documents, SMB, etc), or Adobe (with encrypted PDFs), Apple should not persecute F/OSS users for attempting to interoperate with their products.

Re:France backs down?

[jkrise]

I don't think it's a Free Software issue at all... even in France. It's Apple's product and technology - they can do whatever they please. If their product became a monopoly.. then, maybe the specs for inter-operation to be dislosed. And unlike MS, Apple hasn't used any illegal means to obtain leading market share.

Re:France backs down?

[GundamFan]

Apple should not persecute F/OSS users

It's not persecution... I don't think Steve has a taskforce specificaly to chase Linux users around with sticks (sorry the over use of that word gets to me).

If you choose to buy from ITMS you know exactly what you are getting, and while the argument that there should be Linux support for Apples products is valid that does not mean that everyone gets to whine about it... iPods play .mp3s and there are plenty of places to buy unencombered .mp3 music files... you may have to make some sacrifices in selection of products but anyone who is without any windows box should be used to that.

I don't mean to be harsh but we are talking about a recreational item here it's not like iTunes music and iPods serve a vital purpose.

Re:France backs down?

[CastrTroy]

Yes, but you know what you are getting into when you buy iTunes. With MS Word, there's no choice, because of monopoly. If you want to buy movies, then you have to buy DVD. Protected PDF, WMA and Fairplay fall into another category. There are other solutions. You don't like iTunes? Go buy the CD. Buy music from Real, or Napster, or listen to the radio. I don't think Corel released their specs for wordperfect files either. The monopoly status is what changes the rules.

Re:France backs down?

[jocknerd]

But proponents of Apple's DRM will argue that the music CAN be played on other players. You just have to convert it. Its a pain, but Apple does give you that option.

The real problem is that the RIAA, in all their infinite wisdom, is screwing themselves. They demanded DRM, and now its biting them in the ass. Without DRM, Apple wouldn't have the leverage to dictate the pricing on songs.

Re:France backs down?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Yes, but you know what you are getting into when you buy iTunes.

I do, you presumably do, but not everyone does.

With MS Word, there's no choice, because of monopoly.

No choice? What about OO.org? What you mean is no choice if you have existing documents (the same as someone with an ITMS AAC collection who decides to convert to freeBSD)

Oh - and word was not the MS monopoly, Windows was.

If you want to buy movies, then you have to buy DVD.

Or a video. DVDs do not constitute a monopoly.

Protected PDF, WMA and Fairplay fall into another category.

No they don't, because none of your other examples were monopolies either.

There are other solutions. You don't like iTunes? Go buy the CD. Buy music from Real, or Napster, or listen to the radio.

What if you already have an iTunes music collection?

I don't think Corel released their specs for wordperfect files either.

So what? Corel's files are not protected by DRM - that's what we're talking about here ya?

The monopoly status is what changes the rules.

Maybe for you, but for many otherpeople, DRM is a monstrosity, made worse by a monopoly, but still a monstrosity without one.

Re:France backs down?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Can you honestly give a valid personal use reason why you would need to burn the same playlist of somebody else's music more than 10 times?

I believe the GP's point was that Apple changed the terms and conditions of what you could do with your music after the purchase was made.

But you're right of course - let's burn the heretic GP for his blasphemous anti-apple ways.

Re:France backs down?

[Thrudheim]

Well, that may be a nice gift for a bridal shower, but giving copies of music to other people is not "personal use." You have no legal right to give away music ripped from your CDs without paying licensing fees to the rights holders. I realize that this restriction is routinely violated, but the point is that Fairplay is not taking away some "right" that we currently have.

Re:France backs down?

[RedSteve]

There are a couple of problems with your rant:

Apple spread DRM.

And they did it at the behest of the content owners. It was the difference between having an online store (and a way to move their music player hardware) and having nothing but a couple of crappy creative commons songs. And as soul-less as DRM restrictions may be, at least Apple pushed for one of the least restrictive DRM schemes available. To wit: their content does not expire after a certain number of days or a certain number of plays; it does not require you to keep a subscription to a service in order to keep your music alive; it does not limit your right to burn CDs -- just the order in which you burn the list.

Apple change the "rules" about how users can use their music (number of CDs a song can be burnt onto was reduced) using the DRM and software updates, even when the songs have ALREADY been purchased by the users.

See one of the child posts, but my understanding is that Fairplay is versioned so that those songs that were bought with certain rights MAINTAIN those rights. Further, the limits on burning songs to CDs are not set at the individual song level, it's set at the playlist level -- in other words, i can burn any song to CD as many times as i want to; i just can't use the exact same playlist more than ten times.

Apple sue students for posting rumours about their products on the internet.

Unfortunately, that's the climate of business in the US today; businesses have an obligation to their shareholders to protect their competitve secrets. Of course, for every rumor that lands the rumor-monger in court, there are dozens that don't. The difference is probably in how big of an impact such a rumor can have on a company's competitiveness, and how stiffly the NDAs were worded with the source who originally leaked to the rumor site.

It appears that any evil you want to ascribe to Apple is really either a problem you have with how business in the US is run in general, or by taking the dimmest view possible of their actions without considering the constraints under which the company operates. At any rate, they can hardly be viewed as MORE evil than other large, convicted monopolists who have done far more restrictive things with their technologies.

Re:France backs down?

[Thrudheim]

Yes, Apple did reduce the number of times a playlist could be burned from 10 to 7. This would apply to people who update their iTunes software and accept the new licensing terms. You are under no obligation to do this, of course. If the DRM change was so terrible, it wouldn't be worth updating iTunes.

The changes have not been terrible, however. FairPlay has been around for a few years now and this is the worst example you can come up with? The restriction is completely trivial to anyone's "personal use" of the music. Slight changes to a playlist resets the counter on the number of burns. Hell, add a "song" that has two seconds of silence and you've got a new playlist. It is just not worth complaining about. How many copies of a playlist do you need?

Moreover, you conventiently forget to mention that Fairplay was at the same time liberalized to allow a person to play their music purchased from the iTMS on five computers instead of three, something that is helpful for people who want their music at work and on multiple machines at home. It was a trade, in other words, that liberalized a restriction that people *did* face and tightened one that people rarely face. Evil Apple.

Re:France backs down?

[cayenne8]

"People are happy to accept vendor lockin until someone owns the market."

Again...I don't understand what vendor lock in is involved here. No one forces you to use the iTunes store with the iPod. You can easily put musical and video content on the thing from other sources. Got CD's? Rip them and listen to them. You do have a choice here...hardly a monopoly on what content you can play on an iPod, nor any other player available out there for that matter.

Plenty of source material out there for whatever player you want to use...

Re:France backs down?

[cayenne8]

"However, because I've already invested over $400 in music from iTMS, I'm not even going to consider buying a player other than an iPod unless there is a compelling feature on a non-iPod player."

WHEW!! $400? That's quite a chunk of change. I just cannot see spending that much money on an inferior format (lossy) set of music. I'd much prefer to buy it in lossless format, rip it to a lower quality for my iPod or other portable...but, have the fullest version possible for home audio play.....and not be DRM'ed.

I'm just curious, really...do you not have a good home audio system to listen on? Do you only listen to the iPod for music? I see it is a different mindset, and I'm honestly wondering about how someone would spend that much money on a song collection they know is not transferrable and of lower quality than other versions of that content that are available...

The Breakdown & The Irony

[eldavojohn]

A breakdown in profits of the 99 cents per song from MacNN:

"But figures from the US show that Apple, the dominant legal download business in Europe and the US, retains just 4 cents from each 99-cent (55p) track sale while 'mechanical copyright' holders - generally the record labels, who own copyright in the song's recording - take 62 cents or more. Music publishers take the rest - about 8 cents."

I remember reading this article back in December of '05. In it, there is a little blurb of the same nature:

But what price is "fair"? Apple says it is 99 cents a song. Of this, Apple gets a sliver--4 cents--while the music publishers snag 8 cents and the record companies pocket most of the rest. Even though record companies earn more per track from downloads than CD sales, industry execs have been pushing for more. One option is a tiered pricing model, with the most popular tunes selling for as much as $3. After all, the music honchos reason, people pay up to $3 for cell-phone ring tones, mere snippets of songs.

I found that interesting. Executives that have nothing to do with the end product (probably haven't ever even picked up an instrument) are constantly arguing that they should be charging more and padding their pockets.

Being a bass player, I'm concerned about what's left over for the musician. Very concerned.

Weren't all the commercials and marketing schemes out there to make me feel guilty for the musician when I illegally share music? Perhaps they should have been showing me pictures of an executive in his Lexus ... unable to afford a Lamborghini Diablo becuase I was file sharing ... *runs to his room crying in shame*

Re:The Breakdown & The Irony

[Znork]

"Weren't all the commercials and marketing schemes out there to make me feel guilty"

Copyright or other intellectual 'property' has never been for the artists and creators sake. The creators have merely been the excuse, once owning a printing press and being friendly with the crown was no longer considered reason enough to get a monopoly.

Remember, copyright was created to protect publishers from cheap books, not to ensure payment to creative talent.

Half dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple settled the price thing a day earlier, on Monday, actually.

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/01/ 2314248

Aside from the troll clichés and all...

[Scrameustache]

France has a long history of industrial protectionism. Their entire televesion system was designed to be different from everyone else's to promote their local industry.

So, as much as I dislike DRM, I think theirs was just such a move.

Re:Apple continues to rip off the UK

[Xuranova]

Rip off? Nah. You all are paying what you are willing to pay. That's the price you pay when you want your currency to be worth more than the dollar. :)

I'm getting sick of techies confusing the RIAA...

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple didn't defeat the RIAA. They didn't even talk to the RIAA. Tech enthusiasts (normally very bright people) have their heads so far up their asses because we all hate what the RIAA is doing to music downlaoders, that any fight that pits someone against a record label is deemed a fight against the RIAA

Let me be clear: Apple negotiated with record labels, not the RIAA

Saying Apple beat the RIAA is like saying a prosecuter beat the NRA when it convicted someone of possessing an illegal firearm.

We so want a digital music boogey man, we give the RIAA far too much power and credit for things it has nothing to do with. Look, I don't like them anymore than anyone else here, but understand something, the RIAA doesn't negotiate record deals. They don't sign artists, they don't set the prices of music. They earn their money by colelcting fees from record companies, not selling music.

misleading

[VoxCombo]

The 4 cent Apple figure is PROFIT, while the record label share they give is GROSS. After all the expenses that go into making a record, and all the people that get paid out of that share, i doubt the record label profit is much higher than 4 cents.

Geez, I never thought I'd see a misleading article attacking record labels on Sladshdot...............

Re:Add This Defeat to the Military History of Fran

[Frangible]

It's true, the French have been standing up where we've backed down lately. People called them not capitulating in the Iraq war cowardice, but they stood their moral ground and weren't sheep-- the Edward J. Murrows of the world aren't cowards. But as you mention they also stand against some Islamic cultural and religious tradition that we're even afraid to.

And if you've watched Stephen Colbert's recent White House press dinner speech, you'll note the only person in the room who had the balls to do that was a French descendant.

It's all sort of silly, anyway... Germans and French share the same common ancestry. The history of warfare in general is that everyone loses... look at the American wars throughout history. We lost most of them. Korea? Vietnam? Moghidishu? We didn't do jack in WW1 and in WW2 we entered the European theater late and fought against outnumbered Hitler Youth and reserve troops while the great bulk of German troops, especially the most veteran and well equipped divisions, were defeated by Russia.

Anyway, point being, it's fun to laugh at France, but maybe this is more of a story of how corporations exert political control than anything.

Trolling? I'll bite .....

[Luscious868]

- Apple spread DRM.

Apple didn't have a choice. You either include DRM or the RIAA won't deal with you. If the RIAA won't deal with you then you don't have an online music store that's going to make any money.

- Apple change the "rules" about how users can use their music (number of CDs a song can be burnt onto was reduced) using the DRM and software updates, even when the songs have ALREADY been purchased by the users.

Apple didn't change the "rules" about how you use your music. You can go to the store, buy a CD and do whatever the heck you want with it just like you always could. Now if you buy DRM'd music from Apple's online store then there are some rules in place, but they are among the must user friendly out there. You can share your music with other PC's on your home network. Granted there is a limit, but the average consumer doesn't have 5 PC's. If you make some kind of mistake and authorize too many PC's and can't deauthorize one or more of them for whatever reason then you do have the ability to reset your authorizations. You can burn the files to CD as many times as you want. There is a limit to the number of times you can burn a play list that contains DRM's music. I believe that limit is 10, but if you need to burn more than that the solution is pretty easy. Use another program to burn additional copies of the CD. Alternatively you could delete the play list and recreate it. DRM is a fact of life forced on Apple by the RIAA. If you don't like the rules, go buy the CD instead. Apple offers a service. You can get only the tracks you want, almost instantly, at $0.99 cents a track and in exchange for that service you agree to some rules. They don't force you to buy their music.

- Apple sue students for posting rumours about their products on the internet.

Apple didn't sue the students for posting rumors. Apple sued the student for knowingly soliciting and publishing trade secrets and profiting from it. Think Secret does sell advertising on it's website and does turn a profit. California is one of approximately 44 or 45 states that have adopted the Uniform Trade Secrets Act. That statute makes it wrongful to acquire or to publish without authorization information you know or have a reasonable basis to know is a trade secret. I don't agree with their tactics but to say that Apple simply sued a student for posting rumors is a vast oversimplification made for the purposes of furthering your argument.

- Apple try to talk Samba developers into making Samba non-copyleft so that they can take the code and close Apple's branch of it.

A company acting in it's own self interest so it can turn a profit? Blasphemy! I know, let's do away with all private and public companies and let the central government plan everything to do away with this evil notion known as "profits". Oh wait, that's been tried several times and each and every time it's been tried it's failed, innocent people have died and human rights have been trampled on. Not that pure unregulated capitalism is any better, I'll take regulated capitalism with social safety nets in which companies and people are mostly free to ... gasp ... act in their own self interest and try and turn a profit and where consumers are free if they don't like a particular company to .... gasp ... not buy their products.

It is a Free Software Issue.

[pavon]

I am legally prevented from writing, distributing or using Free Software that can play music encoded with Apple's Fairplay DRM. Therefore it is a Free Software issue. It may be one that you don't care about, but it is one. That said, Free Software and DRM Software are inherently incompatible as DRM is an encryption scheme that requires you to both widely distribute the key and keep it secret at the same time. The only way to do this is by obscuring the key in software or hardware. Therefore, the only way to implement DRM as Free Software and follow the letter of the law, is if the keys are in hardware, and there is no way to do so while following the spirit of the law. So the only solution to the Free Software issue is no DRM.

It is also a free market issue - unlike most other media formats and DRM schemes (CSS, HDMI, WMA) which can be licensed by any party under RAND terms, Fairplay is not available for license. This is helping Apple to create a monopoly, by sheltering it from competition due to legal restrictions, rather than basing it's success solely on the merit of the product (which is does have).

Lastly Microsoft didn't get to be a monopoly (in it's OS) through illegal means. Like all other OSes at the time, they lived and died with the system it was written for. The IBM PC had the advantages of people wanting to use the same machine as at work and later of low costs due to commoditization. The other PC's couldn't compete with this, and thus died. Microsoft rose to dominance because the IBM PC rose to dominance. Everything else (even their very real illegal acts) is noise.

Frankly, I have always thought our antitrust laws were pretty stupid. We give companies huge amount of anti-competitive powers through "IP", and practically unrestricted mergers, and then wait until they inevitably become monopolies (or oligopolies) to enforce a bunch of hollow antitrust laws that do little more than waist time in court. Why wait until someone is a monopoly to start caring about promoting a free competitive market?

Lastly, and most importantly, it is a consumers rights issue. If I have legally obtained documents, I will view them as I please - whether the person trying to restrict me from doing so is a monopoly or not is of no consequence.

</rant> (haven't had my cherios this morning :)

Why the bill was diluted, and Apple's DRM benefits

[SuperKendall]

First of all, the bill was probably diluted out of fear for yet another uprising of French youth. After all, if they rose up against a job bill what would happen to the government that screwed with thier music?

Secondly, Apple's use of DRM is helping the anti-DRM crusade. In a bit of DRM judo, Apple has basically hijacked music DRM from the industry that meant to controll it and is using that power to dictate exactly how the online music market is to be run. Eventually studios will wake up and realize that they would be fine selling music without DRM, and indeed it's the only way to break free of Apple's grip over distribution. Then we'll not need DRM anymore as studios just sell FLAC and MP3 online, what we all wanted in the first place. Also at that point you'll be able to use any player you like again and not just iPods (so extra pressure on teh labels to move to a DRM free model will eventually come from Microsoft).

So smile when Apple mentions FairPlay, 'cause they are the ones saving you from the REAL DRM world we might all have been living in without them.

Re:Nice troll. Try again.

[Kadin2048]

Apple Computers is allowed to use the name Apple on the condition it never enters the music business.

There's the speculation.

Neither you nor I has any idea what Apple Computer and Apple Records agreed to or not; even if they did agree to something like that, the whole disagreement could hinge on how they defined "music business" within the contract.

You're making it seem like it's somehow a cut-and-dried issue when in reality it almost certainly is not.

Re:The bigger they are the harder they fall

[Ohreally_factor]

I don't think it's a good idea, but I'm not even sure it's possible.

For the record, I'm an Apple fanatic that pops wood whenever I see a Mac, and my butthole gets wet at every keynote.

What sort of monopoly are we talking about? A monopoly on music distribution? A monopoly on music players? In regards to Music distribution, Apple would need to wrest control of the content from the RIAA cartel. Certainly, Apple has helped destabilize the music cartel's control of music distribution, but those wheels were set into motion long before the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) by the original Napster and later filesharing technologies.

What's really going to kill the RIAA cartel is artists getting out from under their control. Apple has helped here to a degree, but the real empowerment to creators has, continues to, and will come from file sharing. I think that it's almost impossible for any one company to wrest control of the content from the content creators. If Apple is going to maintain it's dominance in paid online music distribution (or even if it's going to survive), it will need to accommodate the artists, not try to control them. If Apple, or anyone else, attempts to become the "new boss, same as the old boss", I have a feeling that many artists will just release their material as mp3s and accept that there will be a certain amount of unauthorized copying. That's if they strike out on their own and leave the RIAA fold.

If Apple is going to continue to thrive, they're going to have to partner with content creators, not own them.

As far as the iPod goes, I hope they will continue to dominate the market, but there is no guarantee and there is little chance that they will ever exercise a long term monopoly in this segment, despite their DRM lock in. The field is changing too fast, technology changes too fast. We haven't yet seen a true iPod killer, but that doesn't mean we won't. There's too much in play, too many nascent technologies, too many devices converging. (My best guess is that when we do see an iPod Killer, it's going to come out of left field, and no one will have seen it coming.)