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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.
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.
They are called Jobs Crisis and are meant as guidance. Solutions are the realm of the secret, hidden Second Jobs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And here's a different naive idealist.
Collectivism is an inevitable consequence of society. Society is an inevitable consequence of humanity. Deal with it.
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.
And yet I still remember several CDs that had DRM to keep them from playing in computers (and even some CD Players)
XDInd
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.
[...] 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.