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EU Officials Cautious on AntiTrust Issues
An anonymous reader writes "News.com has a piece up looking at reactions from EU officials to the iTMS antitrust case. The individuals involved are wary of cracking open the DRM that protects the music sold at the iTunes Music Store." From the article: "One of the most outspoken government advocates on the issue is Norwegian consumer ombudsman Bjorn Erik Thon, who said he would act soon depending on how Apple responds to a letter the government had sent the company. If Apple can require an iPod for songs via iTunes, then music, book and film companies might restrict their products to specific players too, he said."
Sounds like Sony and Blu-Ray.
We are the Borg...
I swear people get dumber and dumber the more consumerist we become.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Sounds like Sony and Blu-Ray.
Your thinking is too limited. This sounds exactly like DVD and CSS, or Blu-Ray/HD-DVD and AACS. In either case unless you sign agreements to support those DRM standards you are not able to build devices to play that media.
The movie companies MIGHT restrict the products to certain players? They already do today and have for years!!
If I were Apple I'd write back: "Dear Sirs; either ban CSS as well or get off our case."
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
One more time and all together now:
You don't have to use an iPod to play iTunes Music!
Options:
1. Play music on your computer (Windows or Mac)
2. Burn CD and play on your stereo
3. Re-rip to MP3
>Sounds like Sony and Blu-Ray.
Sounds like every game console ever made.
So what? Game companies can make games that run on only one platform. The company that makes my water pitcher makes filters that can only fit in one brand of pitchers.
The problem isn't the DRM itself. Apple (and others) make intentionally crippled products, limited by this DRM junk. The consumer is free to decide if the crippled product is worth the price he/she is being asked to pay. If it's not, the product goes away, for lack of a market. Maybe some consumers DO find it a worthwhile trade, and the company can flouish because of it. Maybe some don't. If a government interferes with that process, it's interfereing with the free market.
The problem comes in when the government also interferes by making it illegal to circumvent the DRM, or do other "unauthorized" things to products people already have purchased. If Apple wants to sell me a crippled product, but I can make it better by circumventing the DRM, so be it. I haven't done anything ethically wrong until I've redistributed the product (presuming one buys into copyright as a valid concept, which we will for purposes of this dicussion). Maybe that easy circumvention is WHY it's worth it to me ot purchase the product. No one's going to tell me I can't rewire my blender to make it operate past spec, or cram together my own water filter out of parts I find in the store. It shouldn't be any different with media.
The solution is for government to butt out entirely.
The whole point of DRM was never to stop piracy, but to force any and all vendors to license the use of official playback by preventing them engineering their own playback ability.
Ed Felten has pointed this out on numerous occasions, and I seriously doubt these government officials are so stupid as to not see it.
News flash corporate sellouts: you can't have your cake and eat it too..
DRM is deliberate incompatibility, and if you protect it you can't encourage interoperability at the same time!
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
There are tons of DRM'ed music, books, and movies. I'm fair sure Sony required people to convert their music into their ATRAC format for their early "MP3" players. eBooks often can only be read by specific programs on certain platforms. DRM protected DVDs can only be played on certain DVD players (albeit, this point is much less restrictive than many others.). Sure, you can (supposedly) only play music obtained from ITMS through an iPod or iTunes, but honestly, is it that big of a restriction? If you buy an iPod, you're likely to want digital music, and since not everyone is a pirate, they want to buy it. So Apple sets up a service for their product. There are other services that are less platform restricted, and some that are completely free of platform restrictions. Didn't the Prismiq have a media download service? I wouldn't be surprised if that media could only be played on the Prismiq. Was that available in Europe?
A more accurate way to argue the point he's making is to say that it would allow retailers to restrict the products they sell to specific players. For example, Barnes & Noble might start selling only ebooks in a proprietary
"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." -- Groucho Marx
The only part of the Apple solution that is 'locked' is the iTunes Music Store. And as we can see, everything available through there (with the exception of a few 'exclusive tracks!') is also available *elsewhere* - and there's a great deal of content that *isn't* available there. Furthermore, Apple makes no attempt to lock the iPod down from handling this other, DRM-free content (and if anyone whines 'it won't play format xxx' I slap them).
At that point, the thing that their 'lock' is protecting is their 'ease of use' consumer flow. In other words, we built this thing in such a way that the only people who can extract rents from downloading music to it (i.e. use DRM to make people pay money to download music to it) is us. If people want to invest a little energy and time, they can put music on it to their heart's content without having to cope with anybody's DRM, but if they want to accept the DRM and pay the cash for ease-of-use, they have to pay it to us.
That's what capitalism is all about. There's a perfectly good way onto the iPod for music that isn't from ITMS. If you don't want to pay Apple, don't. Buy a CD and rip it. Hell, record it yourself and load it. Your iPod will play it just fine. These bills have zip to do with protecting consumers, they have to do with protecting other businesses who want to extract their own rents in the DRM download market and want to freeload off the iPod's popularity. Screw 'em.
A hero is someone who knows when to run away. I am a hero. -Trent the Uncatchable
Er, Norway is not in the EU, so frankly what Bjorn Erik Thon thinks is of no importance whatsoever to what the EU competition officials might or might not do.
So if Apple were to agree to license out FairPlay to anyone willing to pay a "fair market value" for it, where the value of the license was equal to the number of FairPlay-compatible players the licensee planned on selling, times Apple's profit margin on an iPod, everyone would be happy? Because I'm pretty sure Apple would be okay with that. Say $75 USD a unit?
Apple is a company which exists to make money for its shareholders. I can guarantee you that they would license the FairPlay scheme to anyone who was willing to pay Apple what it's worth. Unfortunately, the problem here is that nobody -- least of all SanDisk and Creative -- can afford that.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Well, the PSP is made by a major movie company. Yet, oddly, you can still buy any UMD movie on other formats.
Likewise, you can buy the same albums you see in iTMS from your local CD store, or in some cases from other music download sites. So what, exactly, is the problem?
I used to buy a lot of music from iTMS, but since I've started using my computer as the main playback device on my living-room stereo, I've come to demand lossless formats. Besides, if you want the full album it's usually a better deal to hunt down a used CD.
(I now generally only buy iTMS songs if it's just one tune that I want, and I'm mostly going to be listening in the car or some other setting where I don't care about hi-fi. For example, I recently downloaded "All the Time in the World" by the Subdudes. It's a great summer crusin' song, but I don't give a crap about the rest of the album. So that amounts to about three or four songs a month, which is a fairly small fraction of my music purchases. If iTMS starts offering lossless formats, I might go back to buying large quantities from them, since it is a hell of a lot more convenient than driving to the store... but for now I'm mostly off the bandwagon.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
We understand what the Norwegian Ombudsman and his department is saying, but in reality his is acting as a Microsoft shill. His department has never lifted a finger to make sure Microsoft DRM protected material is available to non-Microsoft customers in Norway.
Best example of this is the government, (mandatory) license financed "Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation" (public TV and radio) that publish all their video content in Microsoft DRM protected format. The Ombudsman has done nothing to ensure that this material truely is available to the public; only to Microsoft customers. There are other public institutions in Norway as well that publish Microsoft DRM protected content only.
If the ombudsman is eager to enforce Norwegian legislation in this area, he should first make sure the very government institutions and structure his department is a part of is in compliance with the law, before starting to go after one private company.
The future is in beta
...without the hassle of ripping a CD...
The only people unwilling to go through the "hassle" of ripping from a CD and who instead buy tracks at $0.99/song are people who have so much money to burn, they probably don't even know SanDisk or Creative exist, or that there are other MP3 players out there besides the iPod.
Seriously -- get a clue. The vast majority of songs on the vast majority of iPods in the world have been ripped from CDs (or downloaded illegally). The iTMS is a sideline, albeit a profitable one, but it's one that Apple would happily sacrifice in a particular market if the alternative in any way cut into their iPod hardware sales.
I don't know anyone who buys an iPod and then loads it up with music from the iTMS, or who bought an iPod because of iTMS. Who can afford to? By the time you filled that iPod up, it would be worth as much as a fairly decent, brand-new car. No, most people rip from CD, and it's dead easy to do. Frankly, sticking the CD in the drive and clicking on Import is easier, out of the box, than getting stuff from the iTMS is. (No signing up for an account, no entering your credit-card number, no high-speed internet required for good experience, etc.)
Nobody HAS to buy anything from iTMS. I'm sure there are lots and lots of people out there who can testify to the fact that they own iPods and have never bought anything from the iTMS. Personally, the only stuff I've bought was a few Audible books, and the free songs I've gotten from Pepsi caps. Even the people who download from the iTMS regularly, I'd wager, have far more songs on their computers from other sources than they do from the iTMS.
In short, you're vastly exaggerating the difficulty of ripping music from CD, and overstating the importance of the iTMS. If anything, the number of people out there with iPods is what will keep record companies from ever selling many un-rippable CDs, since so many people buy CDs and the first thing they do is stick them in their computers and rip them to their iPod.
If Apple offered a Napster-like music subscription ("all you can eat") service through the iTMS, then I would start to see your point of view: then you'd have a digital download service that was a practical source from which to fill up a HD-based music player. But at 99 cents a song, and much higher in some places in Europe, the iTMS certainly isn't it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
It seems to me the Motorola phone is the exception that proves my point. Apple is will to work with some device makers to allow playing on iTunes content outside of an iPod. They are just very picky who they allow to do so.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I don't understand.
1. You don't have to buy an iPod. You can buy any music player you want; and there are plenty of vendors. Furthermore, you can use any of your music players with Windows or OS X.
2. You don't have to buy songs from iTunes. You can use any online service you want; and there are plenty of vendors. Unlike the OS scene, lower marketshare for Microsoft's online music store, or Real's online music store does != less content. Napster has 1.5 million pay-for songs on it. MSN music has millions, as does Rhapsody. Nobodies forcing you to use iTunes.
3. iTunes *will* rip MP3 or AAC without an iPod, on both Windows and OS X. iTunes *will* copy MP3s or AACs to _any_ USB block device-style MP3 player, without you having to own an iPod. However you purchase non-DRM MP3s or AACs, you can manage them with iTunes, and copy them to _any_ USB block style device; including iPods.
4. The iPod can be access without using iTunes. There's plenty of Linux tools, and a fair number of OS X and Windows tools. MP3s and/or AACs can be copied to your iPod.
The ONLY limitation on the iPod/iTunes combination is AACs purchased on iTunes protected by FairPlay. Now, if iTunes had exclusive marketing agreements with the RIAA regarding content, or if the iTunes music store was the only online music store out there, or if no one made MP3 players but Apple; then there would be an anti-trust argument. As it is, the consumer *is not hurt* in *any* way by iTunes/iPod. You can buy a Samsung MP3 player, and play the _same_ exact music from the MSN Music store as you would have purchased from iTunes. Better yet, if you purchased non-DRMd music, you could managed it via iTunes and play it on your Samsung MP3 player.
The iPod/iTunes combination is less of an anti-trust problem than Windows/Windows software, or Xbox360/Xbox games, or Blu-ray/BD-ROMS, and HD-DVD/HD-DVD disks. Out of all of these product "tie-ins", the online music market is the *only* one where you can purchase the same _exact_ content from multiple providers. It's actually a competitive landscape.
Context is very important for antitrust. It's not about principle; in no way does Apple DRM limit market availability for RIAA music, unless the RIAA decides to exclusively license Apple, which they _have not done_. Now, I do believe that DRM is bad, but antitrust legislation is not the correct way to resolve it.
Any argument you can come up with regarding iPod/iTunes applies 100 fold to Windows/Windows Media/Software/Music. Win32-only, or WMV only is a far bigger problem in terms of competition, and you can easily see that by comparing the online libraries of OS X content versus Win32 content.
That all being said, product-tie-ins is one of the weakest forms of monopoly abuse. I suspect that all this noise regarding iTunes/iPod is being generated by Microsoft funding. Nothing else really makes sense. For god sakes, Apple has even started to license FairPlay, in terms of usage on Motorola's phones; and don't forget that Apple is NOT vertically integrated with content providers (RIAA).
I'm all in favor of generalized legislation protecting the consumers right to reverse engineer DRM for us on . Should I be able to try and crack FairPlay in order to play DRMd AACs on my Rio Karma? Sure. It's retarded that reverse engineering content you've paid for for usage on a hardware you own is illegal. But legally busting Apple without going after Microsoft/Sony/Real/AACS/CSS/HDMI ? What fucking sense does that make?
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
This is stupid. DRM and free competition are fundamentally incompatible.
First they want DRM, now they whine that it's not *their* DRM? Tough luck.
All of the anti-trust arguments rest on Apple's market share. In turn, in order for the iTMS to be relevant, it seems to me that you'd have to prove the availability of iTMS on the iPod and NOT on other players to be a factor in the purchasing decision of the iPod. However, that's backwards from reality. The iPod was a massive hit before iTMS was doing well, and iTMS is an effort to capitalize on a much bigger product - the sale of iPOD hardware. At that point, Apple had a better product than the competition, and is attempting to capitalize on that fact. They are not preventing anyone from selling other mp3/aac players. They're not preventing anyone from selling their content through iTMS. They're not preventing anyone from setting up competing digital distribution links - market choice, however, may make it difficult, and entities may be petitioning for relief from that. I say this because *unless* they have clauses in their distribution contracts with content providers saying that 'unless the iTMS is the ONLY digital distribution source you use, you can't distribute through iTMS' they're not preventing the sale of music through other digital download services. (CAVEAT: THEY MAY HAVE THESE CLAUSES, I DON'T KNOW! If they do, then I acknowledge a problem!) Rather, they're using their market position to encourage people to buy music through iTMS, because it's easier than ripping CDs. Making things easier is not monopolistic; making *other* things *harder* deliberately is. The former is innovation. The latter is anticompetitive.
Leveraging a market position to sell more of something is not illegal. Leveraging it to restrict *other* people selling things may indeed be illegal. However, given that the iPod (and iTunes) will accept non-DRMed tracks from non-Apple sources (online and off), I argue that they're not preventing anything - they're just refusing to do R&D work to make it easy for other people to sell stuff in their patch. I really don't have a problem with that.
And to those that note that Norway isn't capitalist - fair enough. Apple, however, certainly is. So my response: if Norway isn't capitalist, it sure should stop spending 'money' buying Apple's products in a 'market' and then using domestic law to tell Apple how to design those products to conform to its 'noncapitalist' system.
A hero is someone who knows when to run away. I am a hero. -Trent the Uncatchable
Apple wants you to use their player to play stuff from their online store. OK. Nintendo wants you to use their machine to play their games, yet no one thinks anything of it. Some gaming consoles even have exclusive content, while I don't know of any music that is available only from iTunes. Don't like it? take your $$$ elsewhere
We are all just people.
By your logic, the fact that I bought stuff on vinyl and cassette is also a lock-in, although these formats could be played by anyone. Because now I have lots of music in these formats and it would be a "royal pain in the ass" to convert them to another format. I really can't see how that is different to buying stuff from itunes. The best format for music changes, and it would be foolish to think in fifty years that MP3, AAC or CD will still be the most used way of storing the musical bits. Whatever format you use, it is going to be a hassle to convert to any future format if you have a large quantity of music.