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."

Comments

So?

[Wordsmith]

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.

"Might"? that's the freaking point!

[plasmacutter]

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!

Confusing the device provider w/content provider.

[Sierran]

This is a common trend. I'm not a fan of zealous copyright wielding, and (full disclosure) I am an iPod owner. On the other hand, around 95% of the music on my iPod is there through having been ripped off a CD collection I've been accruing over the past 15 years. The Norwegian ombudsman's quote seems to me to miss the one critical point that other posters above me have had no trouble seeing: The fact that Apple is the sole source of the player but not the content. If they were the sole source of both, that would indeed be a problem. If there were no other way to get music onto an iPod, that would indeed be a problem. If there were no other way to get downloaded music from the internet legally onto an iPod, that would be a problem. However, those aren't true. You can buy music on CD. You can get it on vinyl. You can buy it from places like eMusic.com (no, I have no affiliation other than having paid them for a month of service) and download it as DRM-free MP3s, which can happily be loaded onto Apple's iTunes and iPod.

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.