Slashdot Mirror
10-Year-Old iTunes DRM Lawsuit Heading To Trial
itwbennett writes Plaintiffs in the Apple iPod iTunes antitrust litigation complain that Apple married iTunes music with iPod players, and they want $350 million in damages. The lawsuit accuses Apple of violating U.S. and California antitrust law by restricting music purchased on iTunes from being played on devices other than iPods and by not allowing iPods to play music purchased on other digital music services. Late Apple founder Steve Jobs will reportedly appear via a videotaped statement during the trial, scheduled to begin Tuesday morning in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
I bet I'll make out in the tens of cents, maybe even the dollars if I'm lucky.
As was often written on various propaganda posters in USSR: Lenin died but his cause lives on! .
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Late Apple founder Steve Jobs will reportedly appear via a videotaped statement during the trial
What other prophetic videos had Steve prepared just for future legislation purposes?
Damn.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Wow. Well, I better get started on my own lawsuits, as I can't install Microsoft Windows on my 68k Mac. Nor can I put diesel in my petrol car. And, heavens forbid, I can't play WMA encoded files on my iPod. And as for not being able to play a compact cassette on an 8-track player; well, Phillips better get a checkbook out and write some big checks, because of the damages I've suffered because of that.
Seriously, this is a case?
I present to you: A FAT TROLL.
I'd like to put Chevy parts in my BMW, but it's neither Chevy's nor BMW's problem, it's a problem with me feeling self-entitled to have things "my" way regardless the realities of life.
Apple will say that it is impossible to put media on the ipod with out itunes... I know a few jailborken ipods that show otherwise.
How is it an antitrust violation to make hardware that requires an included proprietary tool (iTunes) to be used, in order to configure, operate, or manage the device?
My USB RFID reader only works if I use proprietary but free of cost software as well. Also, it requires a proprietary program called a hardware driver.
I can think of a few major access control hardware products that also have a required (free) Windows based software program you are required to download and install, before you can manage the device.
You can load MP3's and M3U play lists on an IPod with Linux. Get rid of Windows/Mac and the problem goes away.
I've even pulled songs off of iPods, although I don't and wouldn't own one. People who lose their iTunes account access think they're screwed, because they don't know how to get the music off the device. I just copy the songs off for them, then use a tagger and the metadata that's already in the files to convert Apple's 'obfuscated' filenames to sensible ones.
I guess the point of the lawsuit though is that bypassing iTunes isn't necessarily obvious to the average user - Apple goes out of their way to keep you in their garden.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Let's not forget the early iPod was a FireWire device, back when PC's had USB. Looks like we better nail Intel / Microsoft / Dell / Toshiba / HP as well, as they actively supported this antitrust violation by not including FireWire as part of the PC spec back then.
I think the suit is more that if you bought it through iTunes you could only instal it on like 5 devices or discs etc. At least when it was still new that was the rule. But you couldn't hook up a 3rd party player with iTunes, you had to have a workaround.
That's a bad analogy. Auto parts, by and large, have always been proprietary.
I don't know how I feel about this case. I avoided iTunes because I didn't like the two-faced approach of buying a license so you don't own the music, but if the device dies, you bought a file, we aren't obligated to let you retrieve the content that you have a license for.
That one little hitch makes me like physical media better, as the physical media is the proof-of-license and the content in one package that can't be as-easily revoked.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
for illegal file sharing. Because plausible.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
I meant to make a joke with my original posting, but you chose to bleat something about politics... So, here it is...
The naivette is all yours. If Lenin was any better than Stalin, it was not at all obvious. It was he, who presided over campaign of mass-murder known as Red Terror — including killing off of the Russian clergy. And, yes, he not only tolerated, but ordered taking — and executing — of the opponents' hostages, among other steps...
For decades Commy-sympathizers like yourself have been singing a variety of tunes to the effect that "Communism is good, Stalin was bad". No way, no how — every time Communism was attempted in earnest, it resulted in mass-murder followed by decades of miserable existence for survivors robbed of both economic wealth and human rights.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I have an ipod.. If I am part of this class action settlement, I'll get 10 cents (as someone said earlier). I don;t want the dime; I want to be able to add media to the ipod without going through itunes... Want a class action lawsuit to do some good? Make it so that there are fundamental changes. of course Apple will say that it is impossible to put media on the ipod with out itunes... I know a few jailborken ipods that show otherwise.
Apparently Apple did change something at some point. I received an iPod Classic 160GB, one of the models listed in the lawsuit, as a Christmas Gift in December 2010. Although I have to use the iTunes software to put music onto the iPod (iTunes being the absolute shittiest software ever written) I have never had a problem putting any music files I want on my iPod, even though none of there were purchased from the iTunes store. The iPod was purchased at Best Buy and is not Jailborken as far as I know.
The problem for the plaintiffs will be how they define the market if they want to succeed in an anti-trust case. If they define too narrowly or too broad, Apple will win. I also wonder how they get around the contract that Apple has with the copyright holders. After all, Apple was a reseller of their music and if DRM was a condition then they can't get around that.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The iPod was first and foremost an MP3 player. Where did they force anyone to buy music through the iTunes Store?
Where's the lawsuit against Microsoft to force all the hundreds of "Plays For Sure" players to not play AAC files? Everyone knows AAC is a dialect of Dolby Digital and not an Apple invention, right? It's just associated with Apple in a big way because that's what they picked.
Did everyone forget the media exit doorway Apple left in place? You can burn an unrestricted CD of whatever DRM'd file you have and put it anywhere in any format.
I don't particularly like iTunes myself, but it's a damn sight better than shoving files around where the massive file names contain all your metadata. iTunes organizes the library, let's you metatag everything, let's you search by lots of criteria and let's you manipulate collections into handy playlists. That includes MP3 files which interoperate nicely. Shoving raw files around is relatively Byzantine, but to each his own.
Most of the restrictions people complain about are to prevent piracy and Apple had a responsibility to put some of those restrictions in place. However, they supported the "Rip Mix Burn" model in spite of the record companies. This could be a real short case if anyone takes off the hysterical blinders.
Most of the stuff on
I don't know how I feel about this case. I avoided iTunes because I didn't like the two-faced approach of buying a license so you don't own the music, but if the device dies, you bought a file, we aren't obligated to let you retrieve the content that you have a license for.
You can download anything you've purchased again it's been that way for quite a while now.
Do they really have to drag Steve (Jobs) from his grave (even if only by video)?
Maybe he does a nice introduction a la "If you see this video, I'm dead. Thanks for stealing an hour of my dwindling life for it. Not".
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
They aren't obfuscated just to be obfuscated. It makes it much easier to look up filenames in a filesystem if they are all the same length. The directories are all 4 characters as are all the filenames. when you are saving memory and processing by doing this, the device appears much faster than if they didn't do this.
This might be true, but, if you look at the contents of any folder you'll find that all the files in it are unrelated, i.e., several songs from several different albums by several different artists. This is Apple we're talking about, there's no way that some of the obfuscation isn't deliberate.
If It had been that way from the start then perhaps I would have considered using them. Thing of it is though, if they change their mind I cannot stop them from denying me access in the future.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Apple will say that it is impossible to put media on the ipod with out itunes... I know a few jailborken ipods that show otherwise.
How is it an antitrust violation to make hardware that requires an included proprietary tool (iTunes) to be used, in order to configure, operate, or manage the device?
The lawsuit addresses that:
"It would be egregious and unlawful for a major retailer, such as Tower Records, for example, to require that all music CDs purchased at Tower Records can be played only with CD players purchased at Tower Records. Yet, this is precisely what Apple has done."
If you read the suit they are alleging that not playing other music caused the iPod to cost more, not music to cost more, "the software updates caused iPod prices to be higher than they otherwise would have been." I don't see how they can possibly prove that. I'd suspect if anything the song restriction caused iPod prices to be lower.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Hmm... we had Soviet/Communism comparison, we had bad Jobs jokes...
You're right, what this thread sorely needed was a bad car analogy. We're complete now.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Oh no, naive idealists kill people all the time.
They just kill them for conflicting with their ideals, rather than for being political nuisances.
I have an ipod.. If I am part of this class action settlement, I'll get 10 cents (as someone said earlier). I don;t want the dime; I want to be able to add media to the ipod without going through itunes... Want a class action lawsuit to do some good? Make it so that there are fundamental changes. of course Apple will say that it is impossible to put media on the ipod with out itunes... I know a few jailborken ipods that show otherwise.
I use winamp to put stuff on my ipod. My non jailbroken Ipod Classic 6. You know there are search engines on the internet that would of told you that if you used one?
Be seeing you...
But it's Saint Steve, podcasting right from Heaven! The testimonial of a dead man has to be worth something in God's own country!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You didn't know this when you bought the iPod? Stop being an Apple fanboy and do some basic consumer research before picking up the next iWant.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
And In trying to find a decent program that rips an iPod your computer will be infected so hard it won't be funny.
Speaking from some of the cleanup jobs I've done, you'd be better off just using a live distro and going from there .
I think the CEO dropped more than that out of his pocket at the last presentation.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Did you copy and paste this from ten years ago? Even WinAmp can sync up with an iPod these days.
But the fanbois will froth and claw their way to the front for that.
WWJD What Would Jobs Do.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
A more accurate car analogy would be having to buy Apple Gas at Apple gas stations due to the proprietary fill nozzle even though Apple Gas is exactly the same as generic gas.
For the purposes of the trial, Wozniak was not involved with Apple during the start of iTunes. He wouldn't have been called to testify. Second it does not say Jobs was the sole founder.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I'm guessing the video in question will be Jobs holding up both his middle fingers, dropping the mic, and walking off.
Except that CDs had no DRM to begin with. And this goes against the standards of the CD. Apple created the Fairplay format and did so at the behest of the music companies
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
You are aware that DRM has now been removed right? How would that deny you access?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The underlying cause of this tolerance of mass-murder — which leads to occasional outbreaks of actual mass-murder — is the collectivist notion, that the glorious Collective ought to trump the cantankerous Individual — for The Greater Good. Once you accept it, there is no stopping...
The US too had a Civil War — 50 years before Russia. There was plenty of killing, some of it unwarranted, but there were no mass-murders. That, in my not so humble opinion, is because we are (or were) an Individualist country.
On contrast, 70 years before our Civil War here, France too had its own — being a Collectivist society, they had an awful lot of mass-executions. The guillotine — invented for easy butchering of animals — was adopted to killing humans instead... Soviet revolutionaries thought of Jacobines fondly, while vowing not to repeat their mistakes (that is, not killing enough enemies).
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
No, the point is that FairPlay stopped iTunes audio from being playable on other devices for a short period of time, which is a somewhat fair complaint in certain scenarios. For the plaintiffs who bought up the music on iTunes with the expectation that they could play it on other music devices, it really depends on what Apple wrote and did not write which will determine if that complaint is valid. For those who wanted to be able to put music from other services onto their player, it depends on if the courts deem the restrictions FairPlay added to be required by the Apple contracts with the Music folk.
The lawsuit site itself seems more interested with getting as many people involved as possible to add legitimacy rather than actually talking about how bad DRM was at the time, but at the time it was a fairly legitimate complaint, and nowadays that shit just wouldn't fly period.
However, at that time, the laws about DRM on music were very anti-consumer since the market was still trying to maintain the old style of music sales and weren't quite ready to give up the whole ordeal. The thrust of the complaint made in the lawsuit is that Apple's DRM obligations to the music companies did not require the restriction that the music only be played on Apple devices.
Whether or not that is true will be revealed once the contracts are shown, I guess, and it will be up to the courts to say if any interpretation is necessary.
And here's a different naive idealist.
Collectivism is an inevitable consequence of society. Society is an inevitable consequence of humanity. Deal with it.
Thing of it is though, if they change their mind I cannot stop them from denying me access in the future.
Yes you can, and it is really easy too. After you purchase that song from iTunes and copy it to your iPod, do not delete if from your computer. There, Apple is now incapable of denying access to your purchased music. :)
Perhaps the problem is that the kind of people who can bring about large changes in society tend to be egotistical, ambitious, dictatorial personalities. Those who desire power are often the least likely to use it well. That doesn't mean that such a society is impossible, but merely that the kinds of people who are capable of bringing it about without turning into dictators are so rare that such a person has not yet been born.
> This might be true, but, if you look at the contents of any folder you'll find that all the files in it are unrelated, i.e., several songs from several different albums by several different artists. This is Apple we're talking about, there's no way that some of the obfuscation isn't deliberate.
That's exactly what any decent programmer has always done want fast access from code. You want each folder (branch) to end up with approximately the same number of files. The user might load 600 Beatles songs and nothing else, so you use a hash that is not affected by artist name or anything else that might cause them to be similar. Something like md2.
Chevy gas in your BMW would be a better analogy.
I don't think anyone is complaining because they can't replace the screen on their iPod with the screen from their Zune.
Because there are rules that apply to you when you have a monopoly on a market (As Apple does on personal audio players)
You can't use your monopoly in one market to dominate in another. That's an anti-trust violation.
It's Internet Explorer bundled with Windows, only Apple is/was significantly more sinister in this particular regard. (Everyone's got an iPod, so everyone must use iTunes, which is strongly tied to the music store that is again only functional on the iPod)
Obviously, it's not nearly as bad anymore. Competition managed to arise, undoubtedly much to Jobs' angst, and so the monopoly was forced to make baby steps toward consumer satisfaction.
I'm certain you understand that antitrust law imposes special restrictions upon monopolies, right?
That's why it was no problem that Apple bundled Safari with OSX.
"It would be egregious and unlawful for a major retailer, such as Tower Records, for example, to require that all music CDs purchased at Tower Records can be played only with CD players purchased at Tower Records. Yet, this is precisely what Apple has done."
No... CDs are an industry standard format, which the consumer experience shows can be used with any devices, so selling a CD that cannot be played in a CD player would be deceptive marketing. Instead it would be more like Tower records creating a proprietary media format, say Compact Cubes, instead of Compact Disks, which store the music in a completely different format, and of course, they would manufacture the Cubes for their cube players; they would both be in a proprietary form factor, both would be patented, and a custom firmware on each Cube needed to boot the player which would only work if digitally signed by the Cube maker.
Strictly speaking..... nothing requires the maker of the proprietary media to license it to competitors.
Otherwise.... Where are all the 3rd party clones of the Nintendo Wii or Sony Playstation that can consume the same media, or games for those platforms not licensed by the maker?
So I guess the question becomes, would it still be unlawful if third-parties were allowed to license the DRM to produce their own music players?
I would like to make a competing DVD player, but they won't let me have access to the software and crypto codes I need, without signing an onerous agreement with the DVDCCA that unfairly restricts legal customer use of the player and playing backup media.
The iPod was first and foremost an MP3 player. Where did they force anyone to buy music through the iTunes Store?
They didn't, this is about the biggest online music store tying one product to another such that the only portable music player you could use was the ipod.
Where's the lawsuit against Microsoft to force all the hundreds of "Plays For Sure" players to not play AAC files?
Well that isn't an anti-trust issue, even if they played AAC files the Fairplay DRM would prevent it from working. Any player that supported "Plays For Sure" could also support AAC if they wanted, there was no restriction that forced them to only play "Plays For Sure" media just like there was no restriction that forced iPods to only play Fairplay media.
Everyone knows AAC is a dialect of Dolby Digital and not an Apple invention, right?
Yes but this is about the Fairplay DRM Apple put in its AAC files from iTunes.
I don't particularly like iTunes myself, but it's a damn sight better than shoving files around where the massive file names contain all your metadata. iTunes organizes the library, let's you metatag everything, let's you search by lots of criteria and let's you manipulate collections into handy playlists.
Yeah because no other software was every able to do that. </sarcasm>
Unless I'm mistaken, wasn't this also the cause of the eventual death of DRM?
The music industry didn't like Apple's desire to sell every track at the same price (instead preferring to charge higher for more in demand music) - yet found themselves in the uncomfortable position of not actually being able to do that on competing stores thanks to the very DRM (they insisted on all content having) not being compatible with iTunes.
I can't help wondering what would have happened if the same situation had also been played out with video and eBooks...
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
How exactly were consumers compelled to buy iTunes and why couldn't they get the same music elsewhere. Like buying a music CD and uploading the tunes to their portable music playing device.
I can also buy an off-the-shelf hard drive and modify it for use in my Xbox; that doesn't mean that Microsoft supports the use of hard drives that they didn't supply. In a similar sense, I've got a 10 year old iPod, and I got to ride along as the first reverse-engineered libraries were designed. It worked fine during certain stretches of time....when Apple wasn't repeatedly changing the on-device database format to break compatibility with non-iTunes song management. My iPod Touch was worse; none of the open software ever reached feature-parity with iTunes, in terms of managing that device.
Just because someone figured out how to circumvent Apple's lock-out measures doesn't mean that Apple didn't do something anti-competitive.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Whether Apple had a monopoly on personal audio players seems odd to me, since iPods as far back as I know them would accept MP3 files just fine. However, while Apple still had DRM on their music, music purchased from the iTunes store wouldn't run on any other player. Was the iTunes store ever a real monopoly in music sales?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
You've illustrated the exact problem. The fact that their players worked with MP3s is not the problem. The fact that they were leveraging their monopoly in digital players to advance a format that stifled competition is. Anyone who purchased that material was harmed by those practices, illegal if you're a monopoly, at least allegedly so. The courts will decide, ultimately.
And, yes, he not only tolerated, but ordered taking — and executing — of the opponents' hostages, among other steps...
wait, so Lenin's opponents had hostages, and Lenin took those hostages and then executed them? That's a weird response...
The underlying cause of this tolerance of mass-murder — which leads to occasional outbreaks of actual mass-murder — is the collectivist notion, that the glorious Collective ought to trump the cantankerous Individual — for The Greater Good. Once you accept it, there is no stopping...
everybody on Slashdot knows that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
don't know about Day One, but when I bought the original iPod Mini on first day of sale, I had no problem importing MP3 files and WAVs into iTunes and the player. I was also able to export playlists as WAVs onto CDs for the car. that seems to void the whole premise of the lawsuit.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
"It would be egregious and unlawful for a major retailer, such as Tower Records, for example, to require that all music CDs purchased at Tower Records can be played only with CD players purchased at Tower Records. Yet, this is precisely what Apple has done."
I'd love to see exactly which law Tower Records would have been violating (the case seems quite old, since Tower Records went bankrupt in 2006). It would have been hugely unpopular and there would been a huge drop in sales, but I very much doubt that it would violate any laws.
Please, this is Apple we are talking about. I recall the first iPod touch was broken down, cost Apple $142 but they sold it for $500. That is a much larger mark up than the 30 cents you listed. That $1 song likely cost them 15 cents to the artist, 25 cents to the labels and 10 cents to BMG. If that.
That's horseshit and you know it. Everyone knows it, only fucktards somehow imagine that a device only costs to manufacture what the components cost.
I guess you're forgetting that for Apple to serve the music people buy, they have to maintain a copy of the song somewhere... I guess you think servers are free, and electricity is free, and bandwidth on the internet is free, and also having to commit to keeping copies of them and make sure they're available in perpetuity is free... also, I guess managing people's accounts is free, and Apple doesn't have to pay the customary percentages for credit card transaction fees on your 89 cent purchases... because Visa and MasterCard don't charge Apple for that... then there's paying all those customer service people... I've barely shown you the tip of the fucking iceberg, you retarded bitch.
I bet you're the same kind of asshole who bitches at restaurants wanting 9.50 for a chef's salad when you know that the lettuce in it only costs 87c, the dressing only costs 18c, the croutons are from a single piece of bread, that's like about a dime or thereabouts... forgetting that there are other costs. The guy who made the salad probably expects a paycheck, the refrigeration to keep all those ingredients fresh, that probably isn't free... oh, and the purchase cost of that giant, industrial walk-in fridge where they keep everything... where THE GODDAMNED FUCK DO YOU THINK THE RESTAURANT GETS THE MONEY TO PAY FOR *THAT*? What about the insurance they have to maintain so when some duchefuck sack of dogshit finds a hair in her salad, and has a stroke because of it, or someone's taking out a sack of trash at the end of the day, tears the bag, and a dishwasher slips and cuts his face open? What about the costs of ADVERTISING, maintaining a fucking business license... it really does go on and on. Tax attorneys... health code compliance, hiring and firing practices compliance, taxes taxes and taxes on fucking taxes... (you've obviously never run a fucking business, have you?)
Even if whatever shit-for-brains supposed "tech writer" who decided the parts cost $142 (which he couldn't possibly have known,) you're forgetting the costs of INVENTING THE FUCKING THING, WRITING AND MAINTAINING THE SOFTWARE BEHIND IT, PAYING THE EXECUTIVES NEEDED TO MANAGE ALL THE AFOREMENTIONED PEOPLE AND STEER THE COMPANY, insurance, utilities, oh, and let's not forget that they still have to make at least as much profit as the average other tech company, or investors will flee..., depriving them of the capital they need to continue OPERATING over time... then there's the cost of innovation, since not every single thing you try will pan out. Some products will be returned. Some will be defective. Some (Newton, anyone?) will just FLOP. Apple has to EAT THE COSTS OF ALL THOSE THINGS... and a metric fuckton more that I can't even think of, and where the motherfucking goddamned fucking fuck do you think the money comes from to cover ALL THAT?!? HUH!?!? ANSWER ME !!!!!!!
Those "oh, the $600 iPad only costs $180 to make" articles are fucking bullshit and if you believe them, (at the risk of sounding abusive,) you're a gullible fucking moron and I have no more time for you or all the other empty-headed fuckfaces who "think" (for want of a better word,) like you!
Have a nice day. Try not to trip over your own lip you slackjawed dolt.
The fact that they were leveraging their monopoly in digital players to advance a format that stifled competition is.
*Cough* Bullshit. At no point in time did Apple have a monopoly on digital players. In fact, one of the biggest competitors in this market is the Windows PC, which millions of people use and can play many open audio formats such as MP3 which people purchase from competitors such as Amazon or Rhapsody. 10 years ago there were plenty of competing digital players, which all ultimately failed in the marketplace following Apple's success with the iPod on their own merits or lack of consumer perception of merits compared to iPod.
It just turns out Apple had popularized many innovations in the digital player space, and it was not as if Apple added on DRM later to snuff out competition, they came to market with these features at time of the 2003 launch of the iTunes store. For example, in 2001 Apple launched the iPod. There were plenty of digital players at the time such as the Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox or the SonicBlue Rio.
Last I checked; antitrust legislation doesn't mean you're under an obligation to help competitors interoperate or consume components of your product.
Shoppers at the iTunes store willingly accepted this DRM, at a time when there were competing alternatives Such as Microsoft Windows Protected WMA and RealNetworks Helix used by other digital media playing devices.
The iPod connected via firewire; it synced with a PC using itunes, and it contained a hard drive with an innovative Anti-Skip feature; at a time when nearly all the digital players were using limited capacity flash, Microdrives, or required a burned CDROM to be inserted.
And yet I still remember several CDs that had DRM to keep them from playing in computers (and even some CD Players)
XDInd
Of course it wasn't a problem because Apple was not a monopoly in desktop, browsers or music players. In 2004, the iPod represented 42% of all music players and they opened the iPod to other platforms.
DRM was a requirement by the music industry to move forward in legal downloads. Apple didn't force anyone to do anything, including buy their iPods or load it with music only from the store. iTunes was a mechanism to rip CDs and load your iPod with unencumbered music files or load it with your Napster MP3 files.
I'd say they were pretty open about it and Apple ditched DRM as soon as the music industry let them, well after other music stores could ditch DRM.
Most of the stuff on
Should have been written as *personal* media players, and yes, they did.
It is absolutely true that their product was good, but that is in no way relevant to antitrust discussions. Monopoly, whether by-merit, or not, is still subject to special rules with regard to penetration in other market places.
Not a single other point you made is even relevant.
http://presentationzen.blogs.c...
Yawn.
Are you now going to say, "but that is 2005!"
Apple didn't have to force anything on anyone. That's not what antitrust laws are about. The fact is, they used their leverage of a monopoly in one market to harm players in another market.
Access to re-download if the original download is lost, and they change their mind about not allowing re-downloads, like their license agreement with the artist or production company ends or changes.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
If your disk crashes, or your music player is lost, then you now don't have that copy anymore.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
It's hard to fail Apple for not allowing music purchased from other stores to play on the iPod. It'd have required Apple to support third-party DRM (which would cost Apple money), while iirc the original iPod would play mp3, amongst other formats. Can one really demand someone else to play your resticted-play files? Especially when that other party does support various other industry standards already?
Bitten by their own DRM I'd say. Proves again that DRM stands for Digital Restrictions Management - in this case restricting to which devices may play a file. The iPod was not included. The moment they dropped this restriction from their store, the iPod could play their files just fine. Which, of course, is in part what did in DRM on music files. It's too restrictive on the sellers.
The only possibly valid claim I see is Apple not licencing their DRM system to other players.
you've never had the experience of having to port out data from SpecialApp on one system to ThunderCode on another system? dude, you always have to flush it through something, sometimes multiple somethings. this is the history of computing. why is bits that tinkle any different from bits that make payroll?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
...this is about the biggest online music store tying one product to another such that the only portable music player you could use was the ipod.
The iPod was the only player engineered to uphold the antipiracy protections demanded by the record labels when purchasing from iTunes. Could someone else have joined a Fairplay coalition? Of course, but Apple was under no obligation to license that technology. There were many many alternatives to players and the store anyway, so the iPod was far from a monopoly. RealNetworks cracked Fairplay several times which was a breach of Apple's contract with the labels and Apple had to engage in electronic warfare with Real to keep them from cracking the encryption Apple guaranteed. The labels didn't want any decrypted files leaking into the wild (HA!) and anything which occurred outside of Apple's technology loop was treated like a renegade hacker.
Palm started copying Apple's USB port IDs to allow their devices to sync with iTunes. After some cat and mouse there, even the USB Implementers Forum sided with Apple and told Palm they were in the wrong for copying Apple's USB codes. If Palm or Real or anyone else doesn't like Apple not giving them free access to what they've built, then build something better. Go ahead and try. Nobody did. Apple didn't hack its way into acceptance but a lot of others were trying to hack their way into Apple's system.
Ballmer himself called the iPod a piracy platform. Even then, the number of music stores which worked with players competing with the iPod were numerous. Microsoft's DRM'd WMA format was offered by AOL MusicNow, Yahoo! Music Unlimited, Spiralfrog, MTV URGE, MSN Music, Musicmatch Jukebox, Wal-Mart Music Downloads, Ruckus Network, PassAlong Networks, Rhapsody, iMesh and BearShare. The iTunes Store was far from a monopoly.
The competing Plays For Sure music players were made by Archos, Cingular, Cowon, Creative Labs, Denon, Digitrex, D-Link, Ericsson, Insignia, iriver, Kyocera, Motorola, Nokia, Palm, Pioneer, Philips, Roku, RCA, Samsung, SanDisk, Sonos, Sony and Toshiba. The iPod was severely outnumbered. The competition was huge and didn't fail until 2007 when Microsoft brought out the Zune and left everyone flapping in the breeze... except Apple.
All of these music players could not play non-Microsoft encoding formats by contract, including MP3 initially until a huge backlash forced Microsoft to allow it. There's your antitrust target. A court case forced Microsoft to soften that later, but it was too late by then. Apple was under no obligation to license their ecosystem to other manufacturers just as Microsoft would not license WMA to Apple (don't know if they tried). That's not illegal. And why would they join with these people anyway? Apple just came out of an era where they let other manufacturers determine the success of their products by selectively supporting what worked for them, not Apple. Apple started selling their own software, invented or purchased, to replace what everyone else was failing at and they did pretty well. What is illegal is to disallow competition by force of presence like Microsoft did to the Plays For Sure partners.
Any player that supported "Plays For Sure" could also support AAC if they wanted, there was no restriction that forced them to only play "Plays For Sure" media just like there was no restriction that forced iPods to only play Fairplay media.
The Microsoft Plays For Sure license prohibited makers of portable devices compatible with WMA from using non-Microsoft audio encoding formats. If player manufacturers wanted to get on the Microsoft Gravy Train that was certain to flatten this iPod nonsense, they were not allowed to play AAC files. Even iRiver had to abandon Ogg Vorbis to get Plays For Sure certification. Does that help make you a little mad at Ballmer?
I totally get why everyone believes the iPod
Most of the stuff on
Which market was Apple a monopoly in? Making Macs? That's about all I can think of. Monopolies are not illegal, but abusing a monopoly is. Apple was in nothing but an uphill battle against everyone else and they overcame competitors with products nobody else could package right.
What harmed other music players was they were mostly shit compared to the iPod. I already owned a few players when I first touched an iPod and thought "wow, so this is how it's supposed to work".
Follow that on with the computer industry's self-admitted iPod Halo Effect. In that era, everyone with an iPod was thinking "if this thing is so good, I wonder what their computers are like". The Apple Stores which started opening in 2001 let people see for themselves. In 2005, when Apple opened their 100th retail store, a lot of people I knew began dumping their PCs for Macs.
An Apple store opened near my former job and people would go there for lunch to see what a slick computer experience looked like, because they sure weren't seeing it on PCs. For the next five years, I knew more people who used to own a PC and bought Macs, including some very combative Windows users who never touched a Mac before. Now, I hardly know anyone who automatically buys PCs, and I'd say all of them owned iPods first when the trend started. That's what killed the competition.
That was also the era where Microsoft started feeling consumer backlash. The mantra of "Windows Windows Windows" made people think of pain and suffering, not an ecosystem they deliberately wanted. Fewer people trusted Microsoft and viewed Plays For Sure as another lure into a stagnant technology future. They were right.
It's probably hard for the Slashdot crowd to understand there are large numbers of people who don't care about hacking systems. In their eyes, fiddling with technology is far different from using it. Even I know that most hackers pride themselves on doing things the most difficult way possible and call people who would rather click an icon and make something work stupid, but the hackers are still in the minority by a long shot.
For full disclosure, I'm a sysadmin maintaining about 50 servers, 1.5 PByte of online Fiber storage and 50 user facing workstations. Most of the servers are HP/Windows/Linux and most of the workstations are now Macs. When I started there in 2010, all the workstations were PCs. I salted in three Macs amongst 30 Windows workstations and watched the users start fighting over them. People would come to work early so they wouldn't get the Windows machines.
Most of the stuff on
I did see where a guy managed to put a Chevy LS3 engine into a late-model 328i. That thing was a beast!
10-Year-Old iTunes DRM Lawsuit Heading To Trial
I misread that as "10-Year-Old iTunes DRM Lawyer."
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
[...] The US too had a Civil War — 50 years before Russia. There was plenty of killing, some of it unwarranted, but there were no mass-murders. That, in my not so humble opinion, is because we are (or were) an Individualist country. On contrast [sic], 70 years before our Civil War here, France too had its own — being a Collectivist society, they had an awful lot of mass-executions. [...]
The American Civil War was, for all practical purposes, a conventional war between two nation states. The French Revolution was not; it was not even a civil war (unless you count the revolt in Vendée where loyalists attacked republican forces with material support from the United Kingdom). The mass executions of the Reign of Terror were political purges, pure and simple. Meanwhile, your “individualist country” is responsible for the enslavement, internment and mass murder of millions of its own (abducted) citizens on its own (stolen) territory, and the political faction which you seem to support is doing its damned best to continue the tradition, so shut the fuck up.
That's a bad analogy. Auto parts, by and large, have always been proprietary.
Car parts aren't proprietary. You can second-source most mechanical and electrical parts, and it is not uncommon for larger assemblies (suspensions, transmissions, even engines) to be interchangeable between models from competing manufacturers because they were either developed jointly or sourced from the same third party.
No... CDs are an industry standard format, which the consumer experience shows can be used with any devices, so selling a CD that cannot be played in a CD player would be deceptive marketing.
There are DRM solutions for audio CDs that are supposed to make the them unrippable or even unplayable in a computer's CD drive (one method is to make a multi-session disc with an audio session and a data session, under the assumption that a PC will ignore the audio session if a data session is present while a regular CD player will ignore the data session). In my experience, these CDs will play fine in a PC (and iTunes can rip them without issue), but many car stereos struggle with them.
Although I have to use the iTunes software to put music onto the iPod [...]
Rhythmbox, Clementine and Amarok all support iPod synchronization.
If your disk crashes, or your music player is lost, then you now don't have that copy anymore.
Not to defend apple, because I fucking hate them, but that's the way backups work, and why backups of backups are a thing, and backups of those and so on until a person would safely feel they are fully protected in case of failure.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Hmm... we had Soviet/Communism comparison, we had bad Jobs jokes...
You're right, what this thread sorely needed was a bad car analogy. We're complete now.
No, now we're just waiting on the Godwin.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
"It would be egregious and unlawful for a major retailer, such as Tower Records, for example, to require that all music CDs purchased at Tower Records can be played only with CD players purchased at Tower Records. Yet, this is precisely what Apple has done."
No... CDs are an industry standard format, which the consumer experience shows can be used with any devices, so selling a CD that cannot be played in a CD player would be deceptive marketing.
You focus too much on the word cd, replace it with the word music in the quote and reread. MP3 is an industry standard just like CD, which most people would have started with unless they had iTunes do the ripping. Apple then convert to their own format to be able to play, in your analogy they would take your cds and convert it to one your cubes and only let you play the cube even though the device would technically be capable of playing cds.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Okay, I'm not seeing the sense here.
Apple had a monopoly in personal music players, and was able to charge accordingly. These players could play all sorts of music. They required a proprietary piece of software, but that was available for free. So far, we've got nothing anti-competitive. It isn't anti-competitive to get a monopoly by fair means (in this case meaning making something the market really, really liked).
Apple had the iTunes store, which was not a monopoly. Jobs once commented during this period that the number of iTunes purchases wasn't that much more than the number of iPods sold, so most of the music on iPods was from other sources. After a while, Amazon opened a competing music store, probably selling music primarily for iPods. iTunes music could only be played on iPods, due to the DRM, although the DRM was dropped quite a few years ago.
So, Apple had a monopoly that played nice with competitors (Amazon, CDs, Pirate Bay), and Apple had a non-monopoly that didn't. They leveraged a monopoly in personal music players to advance a format that seems to have attracted competition.
Now, the iTunes store was primarily intended to make iPods more attractive, and if the iTunes store had been a monopoly that would have been illegal. If the iPod had required the iTunes store, that would have been illegal.
I am simply not seeing how the iTunes store stifled competition.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Do you make backups? Do your family members make backups? Do your friends make backups?
Where do you store your backups? On the cloud, aka, someone else's computer? On media at your home? On media at someone else's home? On media in a safe deposit box at a bank? What kind of media, how shelf-stable is it for years on end, and how do you manage your backups so that you can do a full restoration of the data?
My point is that even large corporations with budgets for their data backups struggle with this. We're not talking a few hundred megabytes on a Travan cart or even a burned DVD, the amount of data people have to back-up far exceeds most practical backup solutions available to them.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I get what you're saying, backups is a pain in the ass to do properly. Personally I have my music on my phone sd card, a 'master' collection on my pc then my backup is the cds themselves. I've never bought anything off iTunes or similar and about 5-10% is pirate so they might be a pain to reget of I need in the future but if I liked them enough I would have got the cd. But that's just me. Backup to a level you're happy with but isn't too much ballache to sustain.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
What? And how many other businesses agree to access a product for all of infinity? Does Warner Brothers have to replace your video tapes/DVDs that your dog chewed up? No. The fact of the matter is you can do that now is a bonus under which they give no further obligations. Especially since it is now without DRM. Back it up and 15 years from now you can play on whatever device that can handle the format.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Audio CDs or CD ROMs? If it was an audio CD, it was non-compliant with the standard of the CD. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The comparison to CDs in inherently flawed as a comparison if the conditions are not exactly equal. That's like applying something to horses when talking about cars.
In order to create the very situation the GP described, so they could lock their music customers in to using only their hardware. Apple apologists then just claim "oh but it isnt apple's fault, the music companies made them do it!"
You are aware that copyright law under the DMCA says the music companies can demand DRM on Apple to resell their music to include DRM? If Steve Jobs is to believed, Apple never wanted DRM in the first place but the music companies were so afraid of piracy that it was a condition of the contract. Later on, Apple was able to get them to agree to remove it in exchange for tiered pricing.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
They were labeled as audio CDs, which was why there was such a kerfuffle at the time.
XDInd
They weren't supposed to be. I believe Philips (which was the co-creator of the standard with Sony) sent cease and desist letters to Sony BMG.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Along with several lawsuits, a recall, and a nice settlement for anybody that bought one of their cds
XDInd
Sure do. A 74% market share is a monopoly.
If 74 out of 100 personal audio players are single-vendor, it doesn't matter how many different vendors account for those other 26.
You may want it to be that way, but this is actually about somebody (RealNetwork) else selling not enough of their own DRMed music, so they made a little program that turned their DRMed music into something that looked like it was DRMed music from Apple to iPods. And Apple changed the firmware so those wouldn't play on the iPods named in the suit anymore. THAT AND NOTHING ELSE IS WHAT THIS SUIT IS ABOUT.
If that is what you think then clearly you didn't understand the suit, read it again.
There were many many alternatives to players and the store anyway, so the iPod was far from a monopoly.
Yeah and there were many many alternative PC operating systems, so Windows was far from a monopoly.
Palm started copying Apple's USB port IDs to allow their devices to sync with iTunes. After some cat and mouse there, even the USB Implementers Forum sided with Apple and told Palm they were in the wrong for copying Apple's USB codes.
That has absolutely nothing to do with this whatsoever.
If Palm or Real or anyone else doesn't like Apple not giving them free access to what they've built, then build something better. Go ahead and try.
Yeah that's what Microsoft should have said to everybody who complained about not getting access to their private APIs.
The iTunes Store was far from a monopoly.
Having many other unviable options doesn't eliminate market power otherwise Windows would never have been classified a monopoloy.
The iPod was severely outnumbered.
But it was backed by the itunes behemoth, and nobody else was allowed in to leverage that.
Apple was under no obligation to license their ecosystem to other manufacturers just as Microsoft would not license WMA to Apple (don't know if they tried). That's not illegal.
It's anti-competitive and becomes illegal when you get to the point that itunes has with its market power.
Does that help make you a little mad at Ballmer?
Unlike you I'm not emotionally invested in this, sorry.
I totally get why everyone believes the iPod and iTunes were made to lock everyone else out. Problem is, all the other manufacturers were doing the same thing and iTunes did not hold the majority position at that time.
I has nothing to do with majority position, it has to do with market power and iTunes owned online music sales despite there being other music stores.
What killed everyone else was not monopolistic force, it was constant improvement of the iPod product category in ways the competition couldn't follow.
It was the tying of the itunes store to the ipod that killed the competition, the ipod was no better from any technical perspective than any other device (in fact in most it was worse) but it had itunes and there was no viable competition in that space.
In my experience, these CDs will play fine in a PC (and iTunes can rip them without issue), but many car stereos struggle with them.
I would say in this case the CD players that have trouble playing the media session are somewhat defective.
It's a pretty shitty thing for manufacturers to do this, especially if they know that certain units will be unable to play the media which consumers expect to play, they are literally intentionally making a less useful product since it will cause problems and generate more sales being returned for refund, but it's clearly not antitrust, since competing players can of course play the media, they just need to be revised to correct implementation problems.
Apple blocked the ability to buy DRM wrapped music from anyone else.
If you have to have a reliable car, then you aren't making enough money to join the luxury car class.
The iPod did in fact require the iTunes software to be used, which can be argued to be nearly analogous to the iTunes store. Tying products to your monopolized market is an anti-competitive practice, by case law (ask Microsoft). The allure of the iPod provides allure to the iTunes store, simply by it having to be installed to use the iPod, allowing it to compete where it may not actually be competitive in its market.
Tying razor blades to your razor is legal, but only as long as you don't have a dominant market position.
iPod was a FireWire device, back when PC's used PS/2, serial, and parallel ports.
You need to get it through your head that monopolies are not illegal by themselves. The abuse of a monopoly is illegal.
Right and leveraging a monopoly (itunes music store) in order to gain advantage in another market (portable media players) is illegal.
Fact is there were and still are lots of alternatives to music purchasing
Irrelevant, there was no viable competition, just like in the 90s with Windows when there were tons of alternative PC operating systems none of which were viable alternatives to Windows.
The rest of your statements are sophomoric. You're not old enough to remember the bad old days of Microsoft.
Wrong, this sort of dismissal just demonstrates your inability to refute them. Obviously it is you who fails to understand what those days were like. Feel free to try to refute them, but obviously you can't refute facts.
Go and educate yourself on monopolies and anti-trust rather than just projecting your incorrect idea of what they should be.
Only in the sense that if you violate the standards of the CD, you're not considered an audio CD.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.