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Beware the Apple iPhone iHandcuffs
Nrbelex writes "Randall Stross makes a fresh and surprisingly accurate review of one of the biggest "features" in the upcoming iPhone and the iPod in general, 'fairplay'. Stross writes, 'If "crippleware" seems an unduly harsh description, it balances the euphemistic names that the industry uses for copy protection. Apple officially calls its own standard "FairPlay," but fair it is not.... You are always going to have to buy Apple stuff. Forever and ever.' Can mainstream media coverage help the battle over DRM or will this warning, like those of the pas, continue to go unnoticed?"
Exactly.
1. Rip your own CDs. Legal.
2. Borrow your friends' CDs and rip. Not legal in USA.
3. Buy MP3s from AllofMP3.com. Legal in Russia.
4. Buy MP3s from eMusic.com. Legal.
Plenty of sources for music that don't involve iTunes Music Store.
Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
You can easily fill up an iPod or iPhone with non-DRM music. Just rip it yourself. In fact, throughout the keynote Jobs used Beatles music (rubbing their nose in it, I guess) and those albums he showed are not available on iTunes. Apple has improved the ripping experience by providing album art for ripped tunes. Granted, FairPlay is hardly fair to Apple competitors. I wish that if Apple continues using it they would at least make it an open standard so we could have a level DRM field, but I don't expect Apple to support other DRM schemes, even when their own creators (MS anyone?) seem to abandon them, for sure.
The article does make a good point, though. If a label is willing to let its music out on eMusic without DRM, and even willing to let Apple have it for iTunes without DRM, then why does Apple not post it on iTunes without FairPlay? I'd guess this is (A) more of Jobs consistency bug, don't get people expecting different behavior from different objects in the store, and (B) Apple has begun to feel proprietary about this music and wants to sell more and maybe feels a wee bit fearful that an open tune will suffer sales decline. Who knows.
Geez, the iPhone must have scared the crap out of everyone in the industry, seems it's Anti-Apple FUD since the iPhone was announced.
c ost.txt
I own an iPod (3rd gen or something), works great with the hundreds of CDs I own and ripped. I bought 1 song on the iTunes store. The article lie in implying the iPod is limited to FairPlay music. This is not the Zune, iTunes doesn't add a DRM layer to your music. It plays non-DRMed songs just fine.
I own a Mac, plays all the fansubbed unlicensed anime series I get on bittorrent. Works even in FrontRow. And on the video iPod and Apple TV if I batch convert them to H264. Again, non-DRMed video plays fine.
So, allow me not to be scared.
If you want to worry, check the big brotherish content protection in Vista:
A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_
Microsoft used to promote its PlaysForSure copy-protection standard, but there must have been some difficulty with the "for sure" because the company has dropped it in favor of an entirely new copy-protection standard for its new Zune player, which, incidentally, is incompatible with the old one.
They got it part right in the article. The whole lawsuit is that one flavor of DRM is incompatible with another variety of player. While they were at it, why pick on just Apple and Microsoft. Toss in the Sony Minidisk and the Sony DRM format too.
They poked the lawsuit at the wrong end of the market. They complained that the players would not play each others incompatible formats. They should have gone the other way and insisted the Zune store, the Plays for Sure stores, and iTunes store all sold compatible MP3's instead of incompatible DRM files.
The truth shall set you free!
At least the article didn't blame Apple, but the music industry.
Well, he also blames Apple. He gives the example of eMusic, which sells a lot of music from independent labels without DRM (and that of course with the labels agreement). The same music is sold by Apple in the iTunes Store with their fairplay DRM. It seems that in theses cases Apple's assertion that "we have to use DRM, otherwise the labels would not allow us to sell the music" is not true.
So I guess he has a point, although I don't agree with everything he says. Starting with the headline: the problem is not the iPhone (or the iPod), the problem is the iTunes Store. If you decide to buy your music somewhere else (like - gasp - CDs) you are not locked in at all. But, OK, the iPhone is what all the buzz is about right now, so that's probably the reason for the choice of headline. He also says that by buying the iPhone, you have to use the iTunes Store if you want to buy music online. Then he goes on to give the example of eMusic, which sells millions of songs online in MP3 format without DRM. Obviously, these files will also work on any Apple device.
So, his arguments are at some points a bit flawed, but I think the general intention of raising the awareness for the possible pitfalls of buying DRM music has to be applauded.
FLAC plays fine for me on my Mac regardless of what player I choose (likely thanks to the QuickTime plugin). If I really gave a shit about your filthy "freedom"—i.e., if I found FairPlay cumbersome in the least, which I don't—I'd rerip my music library to AIFF or Apple Lossless and lug those around on my iPod, which plays both formats, by the way.
Really, the iPod platform was much more fun before Apple opened it to you PC-using fucktards. We thought there were schisms in the Mac community before; the arrival of you tasteless party crashers, though, has united us all against the slow of mind and still of soul. You ever wonder why Apple discontinued the "switcher" campaign? It's because they noticed too many of you were actually taking the bait. Drown in beige and die.
And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
The article also says that the four major labels refuse to put music on eMusic. The DRM free songs they have released are few. Some conspiracy theorists claim this is to show it doesn't work, but I think they don't like Apple being the dominant one in the relationship, so they are trying a variety of means to see what works best, including subscription services, PlayForSure, and DRM free music. They wouldn't be doing this if Apple hadn't flipped the tables. As to why Apple won't let artists upload music DRM free, I can take a couple of guesses, but they are just guesses. Maybe the DRM process is automated, and Apple sees no need to go through the process of releasing music in different formats. Maybe their agreement with the big four requires it. Maybe they do want to lock people in. But if so, I wouldn't think they would have provided such an easy to use back door, as well as all of the tools to make it work.
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
This is not the greatest sig in the world, this is just a tribute.
I think the iPhone is a work of art. Beautiful, functional, and a perfect embodiment of what Steve Jobs must want. Unfortunately, he doesn't want the same things as me, which just might kill it for me.
Lack of 3rd party apps will kill the iPhone, at least as a smartphone. While the Blackberry is pretty cool out of the box, it takes a couple extra 3rd party applications to really make it shine.
Hopefully, Jobs statement is more in line with what is required for the blackberry - applications must be signed, and you pay ~$100 for a developer license which lets you sign anything you want. Time will tell.
I think I'll go buy a Zune then sue Microsoft because my iTunes songs don't work on the Zune. I hope this case gets thrown out and the woman has to pay the court costs.
Although I am vehemently anti-DRM I couldn't agree with you more. If a consumer purchases a device with DRM, they ultimately must live with that. Hopefully the judgment will we "tough, too bad so sad...". It will actually be a victory for anti-DRM as it will force consumers to spend their money on non-DRM products. Then we will see some real progress.
When I rip my audio CDs, everything goes into DRM free MP3. I even keep them on a Linux share as so Microsoft can't get the originals. It may be paranoid, but that license file in XP bugs me even though I haven't been hit by it yet. I will even hold off on Vista until it is certain Vista will not alter the collection.
Not only is the iPhone's FairPlay DRM the same story as the iPods, but its software model should also follow the model of 5G iPod games: cheap, high volume, decent quality ... vs. the overpriced or hit and miss shareware stuff that offers developers little reason to do anything really interesting for the Palm Treo.
I have a Treo, and am aware of the various things that are around for it, but iv'e also discovered what a crappy sync/update/install system it offers, and how it's unlikely that apps, once installed, will continue to work past two sync cycles. Vindigo refuses to sync all the time. Palm's own HotSync for photos is simply brain dead. A hack to support Google Maps required tracking down and installing a problematic Java VM, another library, and a flakey shareware app that never worked quite right. Most users don't want a toy box to hack on, they want a friggen phone that just works.
Part of the Treo's problem is shoddy 3rd party programming, part is the minimal memory available on the Treo, and part is simply the difficulty of managing a random assortment of apps installed on a platform with minimal regard for security (the Palm OS running a phone is like the classic Mac OS running a webserver - yes it can happen, but it's far beyond anything it was ever inteded to do).
RoughlyDrafted has a series of articles looking "Inside the iPhone," exploring why Apple didn't target faster 3G networks in EDGE, EVDO, HSUPA, 3G, and WiFi, a substantiated look at how the iPhone is indeed running OS X (contrary to yesterday's uninformed reports that it isn't), what it means to users and developers, and how ARM is involved, in Mac OS X, ARM, and iPod OS X, and why the supposedly "closed system" Apple describes for the iPhone won't preclude third party development in Third Party Software.
That's why I keep a copy of PodPlayer (Windows) and expod (OS X) on my iPod at all times (plus I have it set not to sync or autolaunch iTunes). I can just plug it into any machine I come across and pull music off with no problems. PodPlayer and expod are self-contained apps that don't need to be installed--they can be run from anywhere.
With the way that most of /. loves the power of "the market" and hates the DRM, it would seem to demand that we buy all of our music from sites that do the most they (legally) can to provide unencumbered music. iTunes may have been strong in the formation of online music stores, but if they can't keep up with the needs and demands of the poeple, they must go down. fanboys interfere with natural selection.
We are all just people.
From the article:
This is not true. Only tracks bought from the iTunes store are DRM'd. You're perfectly free to rip your own music, or - legally or illegally - download it from sources without DRM. I encourage everyone not to buy from the iTunes store (although I have to admit to buying about 10 tracks and 2 albums for convenience's sake).
I love eMusic, but this is a very stupid feature of theirs. It _is_ possible to browse without signing up, but they make it really hard to find.
Try this: http://www.emusic.com/browse/all.html I think this will work for you.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
You're not very familiar with newspaper comics and Internet culture, are you? Its an old saying that's been doing the rounds for years. When someone says something like "and a pony for everyone", it usually means, in a light-hearted way, they wish everyone gets what they want, but know that its purely wishful thinking, just as some may tack on "and world peace" to the end of their wishes.
It comes from a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, where Susie is wishing some bad things would happen to Calvin for teasing her. After making a number of such wishes, she thought something along the lines of "well, as long as I'm wishing, I also want a pony", recognizing the odds of getting any of it.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost