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Antitrust Suit Filed To Halt Apple 'Music Monopoly'
Dotnaught writes with word of an anti-trust lawsuit filed against Apple late last month. Information Week has the story, a suit charging the company with maintaining an illegal monopoly on the digital music market. "The complaint goes beyond software licensing politics and charges Apple with deliberately designing its iPod hardware to be incompatible with WMA. One of the third-party components in iPods, the Portal Player System-On-A-Chip, supports WMA, according to the complaint. 'Apple, however, deliberately designed the iPod's software so that it would only play a single protected digital format, Apple's FairPlay-modified AAC format,' the complaint states. 'Deliberately disabling a desirable feature of a computer product is known as crippling a product, and software that does this is known as crippleware.'"
These people need to learn the difference between codecs and DRM schemes. WMA support means the hardware can decode it, not decrypt the data. You're going to force Apple to license Microsoft's DRM? That's retarded.
Disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time.
The suit might have merit if the iPod would not play MP3 files or some other standard format. WMA is not a standard--hell, the "W" stands for "Windows" for crying out loud. Can Microsoft be sued for not supporting "Apple File Protocol" or some other Apple-specific protocol?
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
$SUCCESSFUL_COMPANY sued for $OVERHYPED_REASON by $MONEY_HUNGRY_LAWYERS for $SOME_SCHLUB_WHO_AGREED_TO_BE_LAWYER'S_MARK
Lather, rinse and repeat.
...because that's the only way I can explain this mirror universe where DRM proponents are arguing that a product barring them from crippling your ability to do what you want with your music is itself "crippleware".
Scotty, for the love of God, get me out of here.
is playing WMA files considered a desirable feature in a portable music player?
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
What is illegal is to use that monopoly position to unfairly exclude others from the marketplace.
iPods have been unable to play WMA since when there was only one iPod. The condition precedes any monopoly.
Microsoft is in fact in the marketplace and makes a very brown player that plays WMA just fine.
Stacie is perfectly free to buy one of those.
Next?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
As long as the consumer is fully in control of whether to choose the product or its alternatives, there is no monopoly, regardless of how many units are sold. What makes something a monopoly is the lack of "close substitutes". Clearly, that is not the case for the iPod. You may not like the appearance of other players, but there are plenty of them out there, and they are at least reasonably close substitutes. People choose the iPod because either they believe it is the best choice or they think it is hip or they have had bad experiences with other companies' products or... lots of reasons, but the lack of reasonably usable alternatives is not one of them. iPods aren't even the cheapest players out there, so you can't even argue that Apple's volume makes it impossible to compete well....
The fundamental flaw with any argument based solely on number of units sold is that there is no real iPod lock-in. With operating systems, you are pretty much locked in. The cost of buying new software to support another OS is huge, plus there are all the compatibility problems with files, etc. With music, you have a choice. You can choose to buy music from the iTunes Store if you want, knowing full well that you will have to burn to a CD and have a little quality loss if you want to move to a non-Apple player, but you can also choose to buy DRM-free music on CD, from Amazon, or even some selections from the iTunes Store. I could switch to any other player right now if somebody came out with a better one. I'd have to spend a few hours converting my protected AACs to unprotected AACs (burning to a CD and ripping it), but I could do it. The barrier to switching is basically zero, and other alternatives exist. Thus, no monopoly. Simple as that.
Caveat: IANALBIPOOSD.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
If your mp3 player doesn't load as a "mass storage device" and let you just swap the materials back and forth, then
YOU BOUGHT THE WRONG PLAYER.
Err... I bought an ipod precisely for the extra features, like smart playlist syncing, collecting play stats, being able to rate songs on the ipod itself, create multiple playlists with overlapping songs but only have one copy of the song on the disk, etc, etc.
All that pretty much requires the ipod style 'database'. I don't -want- to swap the materials back and forth manually. TYVM.
I -do- agree it sucks that music is sort of hidden on the ipod, and can't be played if its not in the ipod's database, and would welcome the ability to rebuild the ipod database on the fly as a feature addition. And there are other features I'd add too.
But between choosing manual song and folder management vs ipods way... I choose the ipod. No question.
But you WOULD be forcing a company to ADD something.
You may want to note that the chip allows the real-time decoding of WMA. This is so that WMA doesn't need to rely on the software to do all of the decoding work (which in essense makes playback on an otherwise less capable CPU possible or cuts down the CPU cycles necessary thus conserving power use).
In order to take advantage of this capability, you need to write software that accesses it. Moreover, if you introduce support for that format, you'll need to support it long after you decide not to use a particular chipset and lose the extra advantages that it supplies.
Before you go around believing the nonsense you read in a frivolous lawsuit (that not supporting all the features of a chipset is tantamount to DISABLING said features)... you should stop and think whether it even makes logical sense.
Right? You're mixing up SOFTWARE with HARDWARE.
WMA is a proprietary format also, with or without DRM. So, Apple not interested in paying royalties to Microsoft for WMA capability is monopolistic? Unless Microsoft is giving it away for free, that doesn't sound like a case. Why not sue Warner for monopolizing their own catalog? Or EMI?
Trolls
Most of the stuff on
I suspect that some of the reason the small off-brand manufacturers devices are so useful is because they don't bother with such insignificant details as licensing (and the requisite fees). So they don't have to disable features the content "owners" don't want you to have. Really, they're hardware versions of allofmp3.com
And let's be fair. The iPod got huge by being useful to a hell of a lot of people, namely the vast majority that wants a round-edged managed experience. If the $20 player was useful to the masses, it would be #1 on the market. But, in cutting corners, they also tend to cut out things like english-language manuals, product testing, ergonomics, etc. You might not be able to drop a XviD onto your iPod, but download a video from iTMS, and you know it will work, period. Meanwhile, your XviD might or might not work on the off-brand player, even spending an hour with the conversion software.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
I find it strange that everyone's saying that Apple is actively disabling support for WMAs, like it supports them natively. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's not like the iPod is using fmod. Therefore, the more accurate description would be that Apple is actively not adding support for the WMA format.
I don't see the 360 supporting Wii software anytime soon, and I don't see how that's much different.
Your ad here.
Alright, I'll bite...
So if I set up rythymbox, and have it sync to a 'mass storage player' like, say, a Sansa. I can set up a smart playlist that will rotate songs based on the songs 'star rating', 'play count', 'last played date', and 'skip count'?
-and- (and *this* is the important part)
When I go off and listen to my "mass storage player" for a few days, and plug it back into my rythymbox, all that play data will sync back into rythymbox, so that it can update the playlists based on:
a) what, when, and how often I listened or skipped a track *ON THE DEVICE*
b) any ratings adjustments I made to the song *ON THE DEVICE*
The last time I tried a non-ipod, the above features, which I now view as critical, were not even close to available. And according to the research I -did- do, these features -require- an itunes like 'database' because a lot of that meta information I base my smart playlists on is not stored in the actual songs.
Now, I'm sure a 'rythymbox' type program could create its own meta-data databse, while still letting me move songs around 'manually'... but unless the player itself updated that database of meta-information as I used it, there wouldn't actually be much point.
I'd welcome finding out I was wrong... but as far as I know, only the ipod can currently do this.
Uhm... It does apply to Apple. they aren't a monopoly. I can buy a song at Amazon right now and load it on my iPod. So is that not a 3rd party "iTunes" Store?
I can buy EMI songs on iTunes right now and load and play it on a Zune. Apple obviously controls the hardware IT MAKES, but I don't see lock in anywhere
except with the DRM that the CEO of Apple is on record that he would like to get rid of. That is mandated in contracts with producers.
If Apple is a Monopoly with its DRM then all DRM is a monopoly. I would like to agree with this, but by definition, it isn't.