Slashdot Mirror
Space Shifting DVDs to Cost Extra?
Depending on who you listen to Steve Jobs has supposedly been pitching the idea of selling "premium" DVDs that would include an extra fee for the privilege of transferring your legally-purchased DVD to a different device. "The courts have held that "space-shifting" your CDs to a portable music device is a fair use. So you can legally import your CD collection to your iPod, or any other device, without paying a penny. But Steve Jobs apparently wants to charge you $4 for the privilege of doing the same with your DVDs."
Is this Steve Jobs wanting to charge you or the MPAA? I suspect the latter.
Luckily iTunes is not the only tool in town.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
While it may still be fair use to copy your DVD to another storage device, the trouble is the disk is normally encrypted. So if you live somewhere covered by the DMCA you may be entitled to move your movie to another format, but only if you have permission to circumvent the encryption for that purpose, hence Jobs can make $$$ selling you what is already yours.
I guess if you don't like it, you shouldn't blame Jobs who's trying to exploit a commercial opportunity, but rather contact your lawmaker and explain in layman's terms why this is messed up.
Seriously, aren't they just giving that thing away now? I guess Apple's push into the entertainment center hasn't been as strong as he'd hoped, so now it's time to poison the well by making the plastic disc industry suffer.
They really need to make up their mind. Either they're selling us a license to their content (in which case the media should be irrelevant) OR they should be charging us for a physical product, in which case we can do whatever we want with that product including turning it into something we can use in ways they didn't expect.
If I buy some boards and a nails from Home Depot, they don't get a piece of the action if I try to sell the cabinet I made.
It's saying Steve Jobs is trying to make customers pay more for the right to do something that's already a right.
I'm all for it, if they change the rules a bit:
Charge me the extra $3-4 and leave off ALL DRM. That includes that macrovision crap and all of it. Don't require special software or hardware. Just don't put the DRM in place.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I really doubt that Jobs gives a crap about which way you view content, as long as Apple made the device your viewing it on. It's more likely a carrot to the studios to get them to let you watch normally purchased dvds on your *pod / *mac. I imagine that if it were up to him, and the rest of us, there wouldn't be any premium.
Jobs usually gets things right, but if this report is true Jobs is pursuing a nonstarter. He wants to make it easier for people to put their DVD collections in iTunes, but there are so many problems with this proposed solution it's doomed to failure. 1) Anyone who wants to time-shift their DVD collection already does it, albeit to the chagrin of the MPAA; 2) The MPAA would never go for any format that is devoid of some copy protection; 3) The MPAA doesn't want to strengthen Apple any more than it currently is; 4) This compromise would only really mean something if it were applied to HD-DVD and Blu-ray, which we know will never happen.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
Or you could pay someone to figure it all for you (Buy purchasing commercial software that has a nice GUI)
Or you could watch DvDs on your TV and not your iPod.
Which of these things is worth less than the $4 it takes to Steve Jobs every time? For most people I'm thinking option 3 will be the only one. A smaller group might opt for the commercial software that does the same thing. Very few people will make the effort to get it all set up with open source tools or to wait the length of time it takes to reencode all the mpeg files. I think that most people (who don't read slashdot) will be happy to pay Steve Jobs the $4. I think Steve knows that, too.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I know this might be a radical departure for Slashdot editors, but have you ever considered only linking to articles that have, I don't know, actual facts? Instead of rumor and innuendo to drive Apple bashing for Page Hits.
Also, did you hear that rumor about ScuttleMonkey? Supposedly he likes to have sex with washing machines. Apparently it's something he does quite a lot...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Apple isn't trying to make money from the DVD sales. Their goal is to enable you to buy a DVD and move the content to their devices (iPod, iPhone, Apple TV). The MPAA has shut down every application that allows their users to do this, so Apple is trying a different approach. Going directly to the distributors and trying to find a way to allow Apple's customers to legal and easily (Applely) get content on to Apple's devices.
If Apple is able to pull in a few extra fees for developing and licensing the technology then good for them I suppose. They are in the business of selling hardware remember. I'm sure they would sell more hardware if there was an easy and legal way to transfer content from original media, but there is not and Apple is dealing with it in a way they are good at.
Apple is (apparently) offering to help. They would expect payment - natch. I still have about a hundred LPs. I have the right to record them on my Mac and turn them into AAC files. It's just an awful lot of work. If Apple sold the AAC files to me for $3 to $4 per LP, I would buy them immediately even though I legally don't need these files. (I spent 14.99 yesterday for a 320KBit MP3 download of two LPs that I own from the new Deutsche Grammophon shop).
Now with DVDs and Handbrake it is slightly different; i wouldn't pay $3 to $4 to save me the work of turning a DVD into h.264 format, but some people would. I would probably willingly pay some lesser amount. What people need to realize is that even though it is your right, it is still work.
I don't think that the issue is if Mr. Jobs wants to make money of Consumers the question is how.
The thing is, I don't think that Apple is going to make much money off of this. They traditionally don't make much on content.
I have to wonder if this isn't a way to advertise "ripping" your movies as a feature of their hardware. Remember that the original slogan for the iPod was something like "Rip, Mix, Burn" but they had to stop that lest they be accused of encouraging infringement. This way, it's all DMCA friendly.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
So their real motivation is helping the customer. The extra 4 dollars that Apple and the movie studios get is just a side-effect.
I worry about this as a precedent. If we keep going down this route, eventually media purchases will be tied to a single device, using digital hardware IDs. I could see a day when you buy a movie, and only have "rights" to play it on one specific DVD player. You would have to provide the hardware ID of that DVD player at the time of purchase. It's no secret that content providers want you to repurchase the same movie a dozen times. One for home use, one for in your car, one for your portable player, one for your PSP, etc. DMCA makes this consumer nightmare possible.
Take off every Sig. For great justice.
It's more like a racket - they're suggesting they'll stop making it harder for you if you pay extra.
Apple makes some wonderful products, but people forget the company has a string of failures alongside its string of successes. Not that there's anything wrong with this, you have to fail to succeed, even if you're Steve Jobs, but iTunes video is best understood in the context of failure, IMHO.
There's just very little reason to buy video from Apple at this time. DVD players are overwhelmingly cheap, and DVDs are cheap and easy to buy OR RENT. Netflix, Blockbuster, Wal Mart, Target etc etc are all too happy to put DVDs in your hands. They are making loads of money on them, as are the studios, the only people not cashing in are the writers (see: WGA strike).
The primitive state of broadband means downloads are not pressuring the industry, there is piracy but it's just not like it was for music in the Napster days. At that time you could literally get virtually any song on your hard drive within a few minutes. For video, you need to figure out BitTorrent, then wait wait wait for the download. Or you need to set up iTunes and then wait wait wait for the download.
THEN you have to get your TV hooked up to your computer, and then tolerate visibly worse quality. This was not the case with MP3s, they sounded just as good as CDs to most people, despite the specs, and people already had headphones to plug in to their computers, or a miniplug to hook up to the stereo cost $5 at Radio Shack.
Amid this backdrop, Apple is trying to make a market for video downloads. But the effort is futile until broadband speeds get up closer to FTTP (fiber) levels. Even then, the studios probably won't hand Apple a new market to dominate like they did last time. Wired recently quoted one studio head who said he gave in to Jobs on iTunes because Jobs pointed out that Mac's 5 percent market share mitigated the risk -- if the studio's worst nightmares came true, the impact would still be minor. No one is going to be fooled this time around into thinking Jobs just wants to make an innocent little side service for Mac users. You can bet a Google or Netflix is going to get licensing parity (which did not happen with iTunes).
And Steve Jobs is on the Disney board of directors.
Isn't the DRM the 'extra feature?' So, since it takes more effort to add the DRM, shouldn't THAT cost more? And then, shouldn't the person who wants the DRM (the content provider) then be the one to pay the bill?
Yes, customers have rights. Exercising them is up to the customer. I don't have to help them/you. If my help is desired, ask nicely. Payment would help.
Apple is (apparently) offering to help. They would expect payment - natch.
Generally I agree with you, although it's slightly more complicated than that because of the DMCA.
To use your 2nd amendment analogy (my thoughts on that subject being an entirely different story, but I'll go with it for the purposes of illustration), it would be like saying you have the right to bear arms, but then saying it's illegal to actually open the box that the weapon comes in because the copyright is owned by the box maker and they don't want you opening it. So then Apple comes in and says they have a legal box-opener that's sanctioned by the box maker, and only they can sell it to you.
That would be pretty ridiculous, right? You can buy the weapon, you can legally use it, but you have to buy the means to open the package separately from some third party? That's what's going on here.
I do agree completely that those offering a service should be compensated for it. I just bought an "MVI" DVD, for example, that includes the band in question's full audio CD, plus pre-ripped mp3's of the entire CD (and yes, real mp3's, on a Warner Music disc), plus 5 bonus tracks, plus about seven videos, plus extra junk like wallpaper, buddy icons, etc. I paid $2 extra over the standard audio CD for all that and I was happy to do it. I probably would have paid $2 extra just for the officially-ripped mp3's by themselves (only because I figure they've gotta have some better quality system to do it with than my LAME... although I'm probably wrong). Point being, it's an extra thing that I don't have to do, and I'm pretty tech savvy - I could do it myself pretty easily - but a lot of people couldn't, they don't even know how to import a CD in iTunes. So for them, they're paying for something that they wouldn't otherwise have at all.
But to pay for the right to do something that you otherwise should have anyway is the problem here.
This proposal illustrates clearly one of the main points that opponents of DRM have long made against DRM and that is that DRM allows the creators or owners of the work thus protected to seize extra rights for themselves or even those rights which have classically belonged to the consumer (i.e. fair use). Of course, the reason for doing this is so that the creator or owner can SELL that "privilege" back to the consumer when in fact that "privilege" is a right which belongs to the consumer and cannot be sold back to them because it was theirs in the first place.
Now, it may be the case that through DRM they have made it difficult to exercise my rights without paying them (i.e. I have to break the DRM to enable my rights), but that brings up another problem with DRM and specifically the DMCA. It is unlawful (technically) to break the DRM (aka access protection mechanism) even if I break it for the purpose of re-enabling my rights to time or format shift or for fair use. As the law is currently written it is unlawful to break the DRM no matter what the intent and that is wrong. The DMCA needs to be changed so that safe harbors for breaking the access protection mechanism are created when the consumer is re-enabling RIGHTS that the creator or owner has seized improperly via DRM (aka the access protection mechanism).