It's too bad this never became a/. story. I would too like to see others opinions of Linare. Although I understand that every company (even the best companies) will fail some of the customers some of the time and/. can't post a story for every dissatified customer.
Based on the # of replies I got on the OSNews story, same here. Although once you get past the soviet russia jokes, the links to tubgirl/goatse and the gnaa floods, it probably would be about the same in terms of feedback . . .
Alright! All too often, the consumers voice is lost in the shuffle.
I attempted to submit questions about a company that bit me on Slashdot, just to see if I was the only one. After numerous rejected stories I ended up writing an article, and submitting it to OSNews.
Sure, they're willing to license it to one company that they had a close business relationship with for years.
I didn't think Apple was too happy with Motorola after the cpu's started to lag too far behind. This is why they had to get IBM to produce the new CPU's. The fact that Motorola was still allowed to get iTunes support on a phone just shows that Apple is willing.
That's very different than a willingness to license it to anyone who's going to directly compete with the iPod.
I haven't read any articles where Apple has turned down iTunes support for a third party device. Unless you have any proof of this, you are just trolling.
If I didn't know any better I'd think you misspelled all the names intentionally.
BTW, just a few details are missing.
1) Santa Creuz Group should read Santa Cruz Operation, SCO. 2) SCO originally purchased Xenix from Microsoft, which eventually became SCO Unix. With that Microsoft was contractually barred from entering *nix territory for fifteen years I believe.
Sarcasm noted.:) However, sitting here looking at the shiny new Mac G5 (with 20" wide screen LCD) we got in our office yesterday sitting next to a pathetic Compaq Evo Tower with a Compaq flatscreen 17" LCD monitor, I think I can safely say that Apple will always be ahead of MS in the innovation department.
I know you recently took the new position as Steve Job's fluffer, but I must ask What in the fuck does Compaq have to do with Microsoft (aside from it runs Windows?). Perhaps if you were comparing Sony to Microsoft and it was PS2 vs. X-Box you'd have a point . ..
The sky is blue . . . Yep, Apple is way ahead of Microsoft . ..
If the buying public wants a converged media and communications device, you can bet that Apple will get there first.
They very well might, seeing as how Mot has already announced an iTunes phone.
What they are selling you, both in the case of cable and subscription music, is *streaming*. You pay, you get to stream music and listen to it.
Streaming is what porn sites do to keep you coming back. It ceased to be a stream when it ended up on my hard drive as a "file".
If you want, you can buy a third party box that records the tv. If you want, you can run a third party application that records the audio stream to some kind of file. The cable company won't erase your VHS tapes, and the music streaming people won't erase your stream caps.
My problem with that is that if I buy a VCR, I'm a regular consumer. If a capture the stream I can be prosecuted under the DMCA. To me the two are the same.
Forget the metaphors, though. Cable isn't as good as subscription music -- with Rhapsody, I have their entire catalog available for streaming instantly, for $100 a year. That's still a useful service, and it's still one that's reasonable to charge for.
To each his own. I'm glad you are happy with what you are recieving. I paid a premium for the iPod because it's the best at what it does!
You aren't paying money every month to buy music, any more than you're paying money every month to buy a cell tower. What you are paying for is the ability to listen to any of the tens of thousands of albums they own, instantly, from your computer. This is not a service that is free to provide, it's not a service that can be replaced by buying CDs, and it's not a service that they don't deserve to make a profit on.
Not one of the examples you listed are content. How about this one:
"I paid money every month for my cable, but when I cancelled my TiVo and VCR still had all the shows I had recorded!"
Not so with most of the other DRM scheme, since you can't convert it to a different, un-DRM'd format.
jHymm for iTunes, Old Winamp + out_stacker for any WMA DRM. Only difference is that with jHymm I keep the same file sans drm. With Winamp I have a lossy uncompressed wav, so I either recompress it and lose more quality but recoup major space or I go lossless such as flac.
RIAA will not allow them to sell their music as non-DRM plain vanilla MP3s for some time yet, I promise you.
Seems to me that at this rate Apple will control a very significant part of the distribution channels, the players, and the way this business is run. If Apple plays their cards right they can take the music monopoly away from the RIAA.
Personally I think the RIAA sees Apple as a threat and is already starting to push everyone to kick Apples ass by any means necessary. I mean the bandwidth 1 user could take must be at least around $5/month for a company that buys in the bulk of Yahoo!. I wonder how much the RIAA is charging Yahoo! per download or play or whatever vs. what they are currently charging Apple. Must be a real sweetheart deal if you ask me to get it to 5/month.
I mean we're already seeing hte likes of Hilary Rosen commenting about how Apple == Bad, Microsoft == Double Plus Good!
Can you imagine the reaction if other companies started dropping unencrypted music into iPods when it's easily retrievable? You'd basically have a black box that stripped DRM.
I still have a copy of out_stacker and an old version of Winamp. That pretty much strips out the microsoft drm without a $300 device from Apple. Let's face it Joe User is mentally retarded, so who cares? Power users can't be restricted anyway, it's a good thing they make up less than a few percent of the population as far as these megacorps are concerned.
Personally if I were Yahoo! I'd be more concerned with the advertising involved in the "All the music you want for $5/month" advertising. Smart people realize that if you stop paying your music will self destruct. Dumb people will sue when that happens, I mean just look at blockbuster. We all knew that "The end of late fees" stuff was just gonna end up with another fee of some sort, dumb people thought they could have all the movies they want at the cost of the rental. In the end when they found out that wasn't the case, a lawsuit was filed against Blockbuster. Those people should have been swallowed at conception . . .
Apple could license WMA, however, for the Mac and the iPod, but they refuse. It's pretty clear who is putting up road blocks for compatibility to lock in their customers.
I suspect that if Microsoft granded WMA support for the iPod it would be a Windows only solution. Microsoft has not released WMA support for any platform other than Windows, even Windows Media Player for the Mac doesn't handle any DRM whatsoever.
I bought 3 of these files recently, not from Yahoo, but another well known co. They were the WMA format. Once I got them I wanted to burn them to CD, well you can't. On top of that the next day I ran the Windows Media player, I got some message that it was 'updating my catalog' or some such nonsense. After that the WMA files would'nt play, said they could'nt find the codec. I called and emailed the place I bought if from, they said it was a windows problem, sent me to M$, they said it was a problem with the place I bought it from. This went back and forth for a couple of days.
I suspect that fucked up implementations of a working product is what Apple is trying to avoid. That's probably why they won't license fairplay for stores, I mean they seem to be willing to license the drm for players (read motorola fone).
It's not to lie to anyone - most folks don't know the difference and if it's not an Ipod, it will play WMA as easily as it will play MP3s.
There in lies the problem! Most people think the iPod is an mp3 player. The majority of the digital music player market is dominated by the iPod. They've effectively lied to the majority of the market.
"MP3 player" is just the consumer name for a device - it's not even "MP3" as much as an "ehmpeethree" player. Like McNuggets, Q-Tips, Jello, etc.
I don't see Target brand cotton swab's calling themselves Target Q-Tips. It's not the same, and if I were Thompson I'd put an end to this now! Even Phillips went after the RIAA for selling DRM'd CD's with the Audio CD Logo, since they didn't conform to the redbook standard.
Which just reinforces the point that Apple is leveraging one monopoly (iPods) to secure another monopoly (online music sales).
Microsoft DRM is awkward and doesn't always work right. When things fuck up it's Microsoft's name that goes through the mud.
Apple sells a "user experience". They will not risk the mess that is DRM'd WMA's on an iPod because it has an Apple logo. Apple doesn't want to screw up it's rep so that Tom/Dick/Harry can sell the same music at the same price from a different url. Microsoft is just using WMA to further lock people into Windows, just another thing that will make it even harder for people to move off. This is why DRM'd Windows Media won't play on OSX Windows Media Player plain and simple! This is the reason that all (but Apple's) music stores are Windows only!
Really? I've not been able to get DRM WMA's to play on my Mac, even with Windows Media Player for OSX. That's very peculiar because I remember my Linux box having this same problem, oh well it must be my imagination . ..
Apple refuses to a) license fairplay.
Really? I guess motorola must be blowing smoke up everyones ass about the whole iTunes phone . ..
b) support any other DRM standard on iPod.
That's their right. Why should Apple support a format that doesn't work on their platform (Mac)? Remember Apple is all about the customers experience, and as far as I'm concerned iTunes/iPod on Mac or PC just works. How many people would be bitching about Apple if Company X sells FairPlay compatible music and it screws up their iPod or something stupid? Apple won't do that because it's got their branding all over it.
It is clear that Apple is the one locking you in.
Not true! AAC is an open standard derived from mpeg4, WMA is proprietary. Just because Microsoft licenses all components to any tom/dick/harry who wants to become an online music retailer doesn't make it any less of a lock in. It just makes it a different type of lock in, remember with iTunes I can use it on my Mac, Windows box, and Linux (Crossover)!
Your post is pure spin.
Actually your post is spin. Microsoft does not make portable music players. They are in a differnet market and are not comparable.
Apple sells the content, the player, and the fairplay drm for players (ask motorola). Microsoft sells the drm to content providers, and online music. Different markets! Get it?
Except that it's impossible to licence Fairplay which make to format pretty useless for businesses.
Not true, ask Motorola. They were able to license it.
Or they can try to make a real and use it anyway and get sued by Apple.
They set themselves up for that. If I reprogrammed my TiVo, TiVo can force an upgrade down my throat and screw my configuration up. In this case Apple just released an updated firmware, and it's up to the user to install it if he/she so chooses.
If Apple cares about their customers enough, they can release firmware updates to allow iPods to play WMA. (Well, assuming firmware updates are possible with iPods... maybe I've just been spoiled by my Neuros.)
I somehow doubt that. Remember the reason Apple didn't go with something like WMA to begin with is because Microsoft never ported it to OSX. Even Windows Media Player for OSX can't open DRM files on the Macintosh platform. Apple used it's own format because none were available for the native format. Seeing as how Apple is using the iPod to bring more converts to the Mac, I doubt they will be supporting WMA (read subscription/windows only) places anytime soon.
How come we bash Microsoft's monopolizing tactics but praise Apple for doing pretty much the same thing with iPods and iTMS?
Microsoft makes 1 piece of the puzzle, they make a format. They license it out to everyone and their mothers. This is akin to Macrovision who makes a drm format for VCR and DVD.
Apple makes a player and service, this is more akin to Digital Cable. Apple is the content provider (think Comcast) in this example, plain and simple. They are more than happy to license the fairplay to anyone who wants to make the player (think Cablecard, TiVo will eventually support this), but they will be the ones to provide the content. Just read the mot press releases.
Apple is being monopolistic, that's their right. A monopoly in itself is not illegal, it's leveraging that monopoly against the market to obtain other markets thats illegal (think forcing all OEM's to remove Netscape from the preinstall and only put links to Internet Exploder on the desktop).
"They" will allow non-DRM formats when people stop sharing them with a few million of their closest friends
No they wont! It's not their mentality. They want to be the only ones who can make copies. Remember they fought the cassette, they fought the vcr, and they're fighting now. They want to be the only ones with the right to publish anything, period!
That's pretty much the only reason that Joe User would want a non-DRM solution.
Not true. I know many users who hate the fact that they can't share their music within the office using iTunes music sharing without giving their user/pass. They hate the fact that companies treat them like criminals after paying. And they hate the fact that pirates don't deal with this bullshit and get higher quality music for free.
And yahoo would find it quite difficult to make people delete all of their music after unsubscribing from their service using the "honor system" alone.
That's not the point. The point is that these companies say "All the music you want for x/month". They don't say that after the service is cancelled, the files will be deleted. You and I know to check for that because we have half a brain, however Joe User is suing Blockbuster for false advertising with regards to "No More Late Fees" because they thought they were allowed to keep movies for the rental price. Remember Joe User is retarded, and unless there are big signs next to "All the music you want for x/month, all music will be removed if account is cancelled" then there will always be trouble.
I found Leo Baca and Carlos Colom to be extremely knowledgeable people. Both of them know their stuff - they do networking contracts on the side for people like JPL.
Whoops, don't recognize those names, perhaps I am thinking of the CCSF annex or the SFSU group. Disregard my previous posting.
Well, I took the first two of the CCNA series so far without it costing ME anything, since I go to City College of San Francisco on a Pell Grant AND get a Board of Governors Fee Waiver as well...
Hope you took the course with the correct teacher. Of the four Cisco teachers there, only one is worth a damn.
Very clever, but those are considered "transient" because they do not involve viewing.
By that token a pirate is only infringing on the *AA's copyrights when the copy is copied into ram. Downloading and storing to hard drive are transient because they don't involve viewing.
Further, ISPs typically have certain protections against suits filed as a result of user usage.
Yes, it's called common carrier status. I'm just pointing out how silly it is to count EVERY copy when infringing.
If it is the user requesting the data, it is the user that has "created" those copies.
Not true. BitTorrent downloads from ram to the hard drive in a transient way, very similar to the way the routers transfer it. By discounting copies such as traffic routed by routers, then you are basically saying a copy doesn't count until it is ready to be viewed (IE Copied to ram). This is not the take the *AA has taken thus far.
On the other hand, I just buy all my music without DRM in the first place and I really wish the media would stop portraying DRM as having something to do with pirating. Anyone can pirate DRM'd music. If you can hear it, you can record it. This is about controlling what people who legitimately bought music do with it. And I think the RIAA has some very hard questions to answer regarding that. If only the media was not owned maybe someone would have the balls to ask them on camera.
This is completely true. I have mentioned on Slashdot that I like my music drm free, and I get called pirate by other slashdotters. If by pirate you mean I don't like a company keeping control of my purchase after I fork over the dough then yes I am a pirate.
Be real people, I buy music off iTunes because I want a legitimate legal copy. I hate the fact that the RIAA & Apple treat me like a damn criminal for buying. Don't believe me? Consider this:
1) Most pirated music is available at 192k bitrate. That means pirates enjoy higher quality music than I do when I purchase it!
2) Pirates can load their music onto their iPod, and even better, they can share it through iTunes Music Sharing to their co-workers in the office without giving out any login/password! Nice feature, wonder why i can't do that with my legit copy.
3) Pirates can always download another copy. If Apple has a db of all the songs I purchase, why am I only allowed to download it once? Seems to me that I should be allowed to download as many times as I want, I mean shit I bought a license for it. Get the shit straight, either I bought a license and should be able to get the media for a modest fee (1-3 cents for a redownload) or I bought the song, in which case I better be allowed to do with it as I wish and that means sharing with my friends at work!
Enough ranting, the main point is that if the RIAA doesn't get their head out of their arse, they will perish. Remember with i2p and BitTorrent, it will soon be impossible to track down who is downloading what.
Slashdot Mirror
It's too bad this never became a /. story. I would too like to see others opinions of Linare. Although I understand that every company (even the best companies) will fail some of the customers some of the time and /. can't post a story for every dissatified customer.
Based on the # of replies I got on the OSNews story, same here. Although once you get past the soviet russia jokes, the links to tubgirl/goatse and the gnaa floods, it probably would be about the same in terms of feedback . . .
Alright! All too often, the consumers voice is lost in the shuffle.
I attempted to submit questions about a company that bit me on Slashdot, just to see if I was the only one. After numerous rejected stories I ended up writing an article, and submitting it to OSNews.
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=10532
I had 2 weeks vacation so I gave them a 4 week notice when I was offered almost double current salary elsewhere.
Congrats!
They sent me home and I had a nice paid month long vacation. Ahhhhh.
Those bastards! How dare they. . .
Sure, they're willing to license it to one company that they had a close business relationship with for years.
I didn't think Apple was too happy with Motorola after the cpu's started to lag too far behind. This is why they had to get IBM to produce the new CPU's. The fact that Motorola was still allowed to get iTunes support on a phone just shows that Apple is willing.
That's very different than a willingness to license it to anyone who's going to directly compete with the iPod.
I haven't read any articles where Apple has turned down iTunes support for a third party device. Unless you have any proof of this, you are just trolling.
Santa Creuz Group, Caldara, Terantella . . .
If I didn't know any better I'd think you misspelled all the names intentionally.
BTW, just a few details are missing.
1) Santa Creuz Group should read Santa Cruz Operation, SCO.
2) SCO originally purchased Xenix from Microsoft, which eventually became SCO Unix. With that Microsoft was contractually barred from entering *nix territory for fifteen years I believe.
Sarcasm noted. :) However, sitting here looking at the shiny new Mac G5 (with 20" wide screen LCD) we got in our office yesterday sitting next to a pathetic Compaq Evo Tower with a Compaq flatscreen 17" LCD monitor, I think I can safely say that Apple will always be ahead of MS in the innovation department.
.
.
I know you recently took the new position as Steve Job's fluffer, but I must ask What in the fuck does Compaq have to do with Microsoft (aside from it runs Windows?). Perhaps if you were comparing Sony to Microsoft and it was PS2 vs. X-Box you'd have a point . .
The sky is blue . . . Yep, Apple is way ahead of Microsoft . .
If the buying public wants a converged media and communications device, you can bet that Apple will get there first.
They very well might, seeing as how Mot has already announced an iTunes phone.
What they are selling you, both in the case of cable and subscription music, is *streaming*. You pay, you get to stream music and listen to it.
Streaming is what porn sites do to keep you coming back. It ceased to be a stream when it ended up on my hard drive as a "file".
If you want, you can buy a third party box that records the tv. If you want, you can run a third party application that records the audio stream to some kind of file. The cable company won't erase your VHS tapes, and the music streaming people won't erase your stream caps.
My problem with that is that if I buy a VCR, I'm a regular consumer. If a capture the stream I can be prosecuted under the DMCA. To me the two are the same.
Forget the metaphors, though. Cable isn't as good as subscription music -- with Rhapsody, I have their entire catalog available for streaming instantly, for $100 a year. That's still a useful service, and it's still one that's reasonable to charge for.
To each his own. I'm glad you are happy with what you are recieving. I paid a premium for the iPod because it's the best at what it does!
You aren't paying money every month to buy music, any more than you're paying money every month to buy a cell tower. What you are paying for is the ability to listen to any of the tens of thousands of albums they own, instantly, from your computer. This is not a service that is free to provide, it's not a service that can be replaced by buying CDs, and it's not a service that they don't deserve to make a profit on.
Not one of the examples you listed are content. How about this one:
"I paid money every month for my cable, but when I cancelled my TiVo and VCR still had all the shows I had recorded!"
Oh no!
Not so with most of the other DRM scheme, since you can't convert it to a different, un-DRM'd format.
jHymm for iTunes, Old Winamp + out_stacker for any WMA DRM. Only difference is that with jHymm I keep the same file sans drm. With Winamp I have a lossy uncompressed wav, so I either recompress it and lose more quality but recoup major space or I go lossless such as flac.
RIAA will not allow them to sell their music as non-DRM plain vanilla MP3s for some time yet, I promise you.
Seems to me that at this rate Apple will control a very significant part of the distribution channels, the players, and the way this business is run. If Apple plays their cards right they can take the music monopoly away from the RIAA.
Personally I think the RIAA sees Apple as a threat and is already starting to push everyone to kick Apples ass by any means necessary. I mean the bandwidth 1 user could take must be at least around $5/month for a company that buys in the bulk of Yahoo!. I wonder how much the RIAA is charging Yahoo! per download or play or whatever vs. what they are currently charging Apple. Must be a real sweetheart deal if you ask me to get it to 5/month.
I mean we're already seeing hte likes of Hilary Rosen commenting about how Apple == Bad, Microsoft == Double Plus Good!
Can you imagine the reaction if other companies started dropping unencrypted music into iPods when it's easily retrievable? You'd basically have a black box that stripped DRM.
I still have a copy of out_stacker and an old version of Winamp. That pretty much strips out the microsoft drm without a $300 device from Apple. Let's face it Joe User is mentally retarded, so who cares? Power users can't be restricted anyway, it's a good thing they make up less than a few percent of the population as far as these megacorps are concerned.
Personally if I were Yahoo! I'd be more concerned with the advertising involved in the "All the music you want for $5/month" advertising. Smart people realize that if you stop paying your music will self destruct. Dumb people will sue when that happens, I mean just look at blockbuster. We all knew that "The end of late fees" stuff was just gonna end up with another fee of some sort, dumb people thought they could have all the movies they want at the cost of the rental. In the end when they found out that wasn't the case, a lawsuit was filed against Blockbuster. Those people should have been swallowed at conception . . .
Apple could license WMA, however, for the Mac and the iPod, but they refuse. It's pretty clear who is putting up road blocks for compatibility to lock in their customers.
I suspect that if Microsoft granded WMA support for the iPod it would be a Windows only solution. Microsoft has not released WMA support for any platform other than Windows, even Windows Media Player for the Mac doesn't handle any DRM whatsoever.
I bought 3 of these files recently, not from Yahoo, but another well known co. They were the WMA format. Once I got them I wanted to burn them to CD, well you can't. On top of that the next day I ran the Windows Media player, I got some message that it was 'updating my catalog' or some such nonsense. After that the WMA files would'nt play, said they could'nt find the codec. I called and emailed the place I bought if from, they said it was a windows problem, sent me to M$, they said it was a problem with the place I bought it from. This went back and forth for a couple of days.
I suspect that fucked up implementations of a working product is what Apple is trying to avoid. That's probably why they won't license fairplay for stores, I mean they seem to be willing to license the drm for players (read motorola fone).
It's not to lie to anyone - most folks don't know the difference and if it's not an Ipod, it will play WMA as easily as it will play MP3s.
There in lies the problem! Most people think the iPod is an mp3 player. The majority of the digital music player market is dominated by the iPod. They've effectively lied to the majority of the market.
"MP3 player" is just the consumer name for a device - it's not even "MP3" as much as an "ehmpeethree" player. Like McNuggets, Q-Tips, Jello, etc.
I don't see Target brand cotton swab's calling themselves Target Q-Tips. It's not the same, and if I were Thompson I'd put an end to this now! Even Phillips went after the RIAA for selling DRM'd CD's with the Audio CD Logo, since they didn't conform to the redbook standard.
Which just reinforces the point that Apple is leveraging one monopoly (iPods) to secure another monopoly (online music sales).
Microsoft DRM is awkward and doesn't always work right. When things fuck up it's Microsoft's name that goes through the mud.
Apple sells a "user experience". They will not risk the mess that is DRM'd WMA's on an iPod because it has an Apple logo. Apple doesn't want to screw up it's rep so that Tom/Dick/Harry can sell the same music at the same price from a different url. Microsoft is just using WMA to further lock people into Windows, just another thing that will make it even harder for people to move off. This is why DRM'd Windows Media won't play on OSX Windows Media Player plain and simple! This is the reason that all (but Apple's) music stores are Windows only!
Anyone can license WMA, so there is no lock-in.
.
.
Really? I've not been able to get DRM WMA's to play on my Mac, even with Windows Media Player for OSX. That's very peculiar because I remember my Linux box having this same problem, oh well it must be my imagination . .
Apple refuses to a) license fairplay.
Really? I guess motorola must be blowing smoke up everyones ass about the whole iTunes phone . .
b) support any other DRM standard on iPod.
That's their right. Why should Apple support a format that doesn't work on their platform (Mac)? Remember Apple is all about the customers experience, and as far as I'm concerned iTunes/iPod on Mac or PC just works. How many people would be bitching about Apple if Company X sells FairPlay compatible music and it screws up their iPod or something stupid? Apple won't do that because it's got their branding all over it.
It is clear that Apple is the one locking you in.
Not true! AAC is an open standard derived from mpeg4, WMA is proprietary. Just because Microsoft licenses all components to any tom/dick/harry who wants to become an online music retailer doesn't make it any less of a lock in. It just makes it a different type of lock in, remember with iTunes I can use it on my Mac, Windows box, and Linux (Crossover)!
Your post is pure spin.
Actually your post is spin. Microsoft does not make portable music players. They are in a differnet market and are not comparable.
Apple sells the content, the player, and the fairplay drm for players (ask motorola). Microsoft sells the drm to content providers, and online music. Different markets! Get it?
Except that it's impossible to licence Fairplay which make to format pretty useless for businesses.
Not true, ask Motorola. They were able to license it.
Or they can try to make a real and use it anyway and get sued by Apple.
They set themselves up for that. If I reprogrammed my TiVo, TiVo can force an upgrade down my throat and screw my configuration up. In this case Apple just released an updated firmware, and it's up to the user to install it if he/she so chooses.
If Apple cares about their customers enough, they can release firmware updates to allow iPods to play WMA. (Well, assuming firmware updates are possible with iPods... maybe I've just been spoiled by my Neuros.)
I somehow doubt that. Remember the reason Apple didn't go with something like WMA to begin with is because Microsoft never ported it to OSX. Even Windows Media Player for OSX can't open DRM files on the Macintosh platform. Apple used it's own format because none were available for the native format. Seeing as how Apple is using the iPod to bring more converts to the Mac, I doubt they will be supporting WMA (read subscription/windows only) places anytime soon.
How come we bash Microsoft's monopolizing tactics but praise Apple for doing pretty much the same thing with iPods and iTMS?
Microsoft makes 1 piece of the puzzle, they make a format. They license it out to everyone and their mothers. This is akin to Macrovision who makes a drm format for VCR and DVD.
Apple makes a player and service, this is more akin to Digital Cable. Apple is the content provider (think Comcast) in this example, plain and simple. They are more than happy to license the fairplay to anyone who wants to make the player (think Cablecard, TiVo will eventually support this), but they will be the ones to provide the content. Just read the mot press releases.
Apple is being monopolistic, that's their right. A monopoly in itself is not illegal, it's leveraging that monopoly against the market to obtain other markets thats illegal (think forcing all OEM's to remove Netscape from the preinstall and only put links to Internet Exploder on the desktop).
"They" will allow non-DRM formats when people stop sharing them with a few million of their closest friends
No they wont! It's not their mentality. They want to be the only ones who can make copies. Remember they fought the cassette, they fought the vcr, and they're fighting now. They want to be the only ones with the right to publish anything, period!
That's pretty much the only reason that Joe User would want a non-DRM solution.
Not true. I know many users who hate the fact that they can't share their music within the office using iTunes music sharing without giving their user/pass. They hate the fact that companies treat them like criminals after paying. And they hate the fact that pirates don't deal with this bullshit and get higher quality music for free.
And yahoo would find it quite difficult to make people delete all of their music after unsubscribing from their service using the "honor system" alone.
That's not the point. The point is that these companies say "All the music you want for x/month". They don't say that after the service is cancelled, the files will be deleted. You and I know to check for that because we have half a brain, however Joe User is suing Blockbuster for false advertising with regards to "No More Late Fees" because they thought they were allowed to keep movies for the rental price. Remember Joe User is retarded, and unless there are big signs next to "All the music you want for x/month, all music will be removed if account is cancelled" then there will always be trouble.
I found Leo Baca and Carlos Colom to be extremely knowledgeable people. Both of them know their stuff - they do networking contracts on the side for people like JPL.
Whoops, don't recognize those names, perhaps I am thinking of the CCSF annex or the SFSU group. Disregard my previous posting.
Well, I took the first two of the CCNA series so far without it costing ME anything, since I go to City College of San Francisco on a Pell Grant AND get a Board of Governors Fee Waiver as well...
Hope you took the course with the correct teacher. Of the four Cisco teachers there, only one is worth a damn.
Very clever, but those are considered "transient" because they do not involve viewing.
By that token a pirate is only infringing on the *AA's copyrights when the copy is copied into ram. Downloading and storing to hard drive are transient because they don't involve viewing.
Further, ISPs typically have certain protections against suits filed as a result of user usage.
Yes, it's called common carrier status. I'm just pointing out how silly it is to count EVERY copy when infringing.
If it is the user requesting the data, it is the user that has "created" those copies.
Not true. BitTorrent downloads from ram to the hard drive in a transient way, very similar to the way the routers transfer it. By discounting copies such as traffic routed by routers, then you are basically saying a copy doesn't count until it is ready to be viewed (IE Copied to ram). This is not the take the *AA has taken thus far.
I've got a '96 Eclipse GSX (Turbo and AWD, no not riced out just stock)
Ah, a Stage 3 Gentoo user!
YOu are missing the fact that it does not have support for any music stores or DRM for either WMV or WMA formats.
That wasn't mentioned in the parent poster, although I see the point now.
On the other hand, I just buy all my music without DRM in the first place and I really wish the media would stop portraying DRM as having something to do with pirating. Anyone can pirate DRM'd music. If you can hear it, you can record it. This is about controlling what people who legitimately bought music do with it. And I think the RIAA has some very hard questions to answer regarding that. If only the media was not owned maybe someone would have the balls to ask them on camera.
This is completely true. I have mentioned on Slashdot that I like my music drm free, and I get called pirate by other slashdotters. If by pirate you mean I don't like a company keeping control of my purchase after I fork over the dough then yes I am a pirate.
Be real people, I buy music off iTunes because I want a legitimate legal copy. I hate the fact that the RIAA & Apple treat me like a damn criminal for buying. Don't believe me? Consider this:
1) Most pirated music is available at 192k bitrate. That means pirates enjoy higher quality music than I do when I purchase it!
2) Pirates can load their music onto their iPod, and even better, they can share it through iTunes Music Sharing to their co-workers in the office without giving out any login/password! Nice feature, wonder why i can't do that with my legit copy.
3) Pirates can always download another copy. If Apple has a db of all the songs I purchase, why am I only allowed to download it once? Seems to me that I should be allowed to download as many times as I want, I mean shit I bought a license for it. Get the shit straight, either I bought a license and should be able to get the media for a modest fee (1-3 cents for a redownload) or I bought the song, in which case I better be allowed to do with it as I wish and that means sharing with my friends at work!
Enough ranting, the main point is that if the RIAA doesn't get their head out of their arse, they will perish. Remember with i2p and BitTorrent, it will soon be impossible to track down who is downloading what.