Slashdot Mirror
Cory Doctorow On What iPhone's Missing Headphone Jack Means For Music Industry (fastcompany.com)
Rumors of Apple's next iPhone missing a headphone jack have been swirling around for more than a year now. But a report from WSJ a few weeks ago, and another report from Bloomberg this week further cemented such possibility. We've talked about it here -- several times -- but now Cory Doctorow is shedding light on what this imminent change holds for the music industry. Reader harrymcc writes: Fast Company's Mark Sullivan talked about the switch with author and EFF adviser Cory Doctorow, who thinks it could lead to music companies leveraging DRM to exert more control over what consumers can do with their music.From the article:"If Apple creates a circumstance where the only way to get audio off its products is through an interface that is DRM-capable, they'd be heartbreakingly naive in assuming that this wouldn't give rise to demands for DRM," said Doctorow. If a consumer or some third-party tech company used the music in way the rights holders didn't like, the rights holders could invoke the anti-circumvention law written in Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Steve Jobs famously convinced the record industry to remove the DRM from music on iTunes; is there really any reason to believe the industry might suddenly become interested in DRM again if the iPhone audio goes all digital? "Yes -- for streaming audio services," Doctorow says. "I think it is inevitable that rights holder groups will try to prevent recording, retransmission, etc." Today it's easy to record streamed music from the analog headphone jack on the phone, and even to convert the stream back to digital and transmit it in real time to someone else. With a digital stream it might not be nearly so easy, or risk-free."Doctorow shares more on BoingBoing.
So, I guess Cory Doctorow has never heard of a Digital to Analog Converter (DAC), eh? Once a signal is converted back to analog (which it still has to be to be amplified and heard by us non-digitally-enabled humans), it is once more free for the taking.
And unlike video, where you can play all sorts of games with resolution, etc, you can't decimate audio data nearly as much.
Also, if this happens, there will be about 5,000 adapters to use analog earbuds/headphones with the data stream; and again, there's that pesky DAC... So, in reality, this is nothing more than a tempest in a DRM-free teapot.
When I heard that the iPhone was "missing" the headphone jack, my first thought was "good call".
Here you have this insanely popular electronic device that people have with them at all times, and what's the number one complaint about it? No, no, /. friends, no, it's not planned obsolescence. It's "this thing dies if it so much as looks at water."
Well if you're going to try to take care of that problem one thing you might go for right away is getting rid of that crazy big hole in the top that by its very nature of design is all about exposed metal contacts.
I guess you could get all crazy in your head about DRM and shit but as someone else points out, at the end of the day however the sound is delivered it must end up being converted into a signal that can be used by standard speakers or headphones.
The only way around that is if Apple plans on making it so you have only two options:
* play the sound directly through the iPhone's built-in speaker
* send the sound via some Apple-proprietary encrypted cousin of bluetooth to one of Apple's own special speaker systems that if they get large enough to entertain a party probably cost many thousands of dollars
If that's the direction they're going to go I'd like to imagine it's going to be a complete failure because people don't have the money or wherewithal to spend on special speakers from Apple (the computer company, not the music company).
But then again you only have to know a handful of Apple users to understand that they would do exactly that, and would be glad to go broke doing it.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Speakers will always be analog so the easy workaround would be to source "digital speakers" that utilise a single high quality full-range driver, snip the leads to the driver and hook up a LOC and record the analog level coming out of the LOC. There will always be an "analog hole" which can be used to bypass any and all DRM.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
The media content industry has already done away with analogue video output jacks. Now they are focusing on audio.
https://slashdot.org/comments....
Yes. Music is ridiculously, almost concerningly abundant. The other day I was struck with the realization that I've never actively pursued an album, illegally or otherwise.
To be fair, I also realized I actively dislike 99% of music with lyrics. I'm quite content with the pile of... auxiliary music I have. Soundtracks, dumps, batches, stuff from video game music. Rhythm games usually contain plenty of music. Plucking out their audio and putting it on my phone probably runs afoul of some fine print somewhere, but whatever.
Music just sticks itself on my hard drive, there's that much and it's that eager. I have a two hour audio track I don't entirely recognize, the filename suggests it was from some trance club event in Denmark in 2004. I have no idea where or when it came from, I don't remember when I acquired it.
"Every second Youtube gets 17 seconds' worth of submission" or however the trivia goes. It'd be no surprise the music world is similarly flooded, and any illusion otherwise is a result of humans circulating 1% of it. I'm not even talking about indie noise, even our platinum stuff gets backseated after a while, with a Guitar Hero featurette being their future's best case scenario.
- You need a small adapter for your regular headphones. This can get lost. So don't lose it.
Losing it isn't the problem. Not having it with you when you need it is the problem. If you only have one pair of headphones, that's fine. It's an unholy level of obnoxious if you think, "Oh, I'll plug my iPhone into my friend's stereo system to listen to a song," and your friend uses an Android phone and doesn't have the specialized adapter, because odds are approximately 100% that you won't have it with you.
- They can fit a slightly bigger battery in the phone, so it will last slightly longer
About two or three minutes, by my math. The headphone jack isn't very big, and doesn't stick that much farther into the device than a lightning port.
- Headphone port will no longer break if you yank the cord sideways. It will no longer get plugged up with pocket lint.
Lightning jacks get clogged at least as badly. And now, if you yank the cord sideways, not only will you break the port, but also you'll be unable to charge your phone. Oh, were you thinking about Bluetooth? Hope you like losing five seconds of audio every time you pause playback and restart it.
- You can get noise cancelling headphones that are powered by your phone instead of a separate battery
You can do that now. Nothing prevents headphone companies from building headphones with a Lightning connector. And they'll work all the way back to the iPhone 5.
- Charging while listening remains a question? How can you do it? Wireless charging built in? Y-adapter?
Two Lightning ports, I hope. Otherwise, this design is a disaster rivaled in the entire history of computing only by the current single-port MacBook.
- Apple will sell bluetooth earbuds
Which will suck because there's not enough space inside an earbud for a battery that will last longer than an hour or two under the best of circumstances. Apple will then insist that you need to grow bigger ears.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.