Apple allows you to transfer YOUR music to at most 5 of your devices.
How's that not DRM?
(Thanks Apple!)
Actually: (vi) iTunes Plus Products do not contain security technology that limits your usage of such products, and Usage Rules (ii) – (v) do not apply to iTunes Plus Products. You may copy, store, and burn iTunes Plus Products as reasonably necessary for personal, noncommercial use.
See comment below -- even DRM free, it is very time consuming and unfriendly to move MY OWN PURCHASED MUSIC from iTunes to a non-Apple device.
What's so damn time consuming and unfriendly about dragging and drop either files from the file system or, even simpler, titles directly from iTunes to the device? Esp. with smart playlists limiting the total size that makes filling a non-Apple device easier than with just about any other music management tool.
as they wanted, but that it is actually the record labels and/or RIAA demanding these rules.
You are more than correct but what you fail to understand is that the RIAA did not do business with Willis. The RIAA did business with Apple and Apple did business with Willis.
Just like you don't buy your DRMed CDs from the RIAA but from the record store - I bet you never complained about the record store in any discussion about DRMed CDs, but alwais about RIAA.
Or rather it would be 20% if the $35B weren't quarterly revenue. Annual was $108 billion. So by revenue it's more like 6%. 70% of that goes straight to the creators and rights owners.
Furthermore, Apple isn't abusing it's power since it's their store and they can do whatever they want.
That's a pretty poor argument. Doing whatever you want is what entities that abuse power do. See Microsoft and the Explorer situation. It was their Operating System, they could do what ever they wanted.
the Department of Justice opened its own investigation on August 21 of that year, resulting in a settlement on July 15, 1994 in which Microsoft consented not to tie other Microsoft products to the sale of Windows but remained free to integrate additional features into the operating system. In the years that followed, Microsoft insisted that Internet Explorer (which, in addition to OEM versions of Windows 95, appeared in the Plus! Pack sold separately[1][2]) was not a product but a feature which it was allowed to add to Windows, although the DOJ did not agree with this definition.
Paying extra for fancy hardware with a fancy name attached to it is one thing. But we aren't talking about that. We're talking about selling people music that's DRM-protected and non-transferable.
So put your scorn where it belongs - RIAA. Unless you are just being an asshole yourself.
More likely the fact that everything under the sun comes with a EULA or ToS specifying that its non-transferable.
The technical side of breaking DRM hasn't historically been a big problem (even if you can't figure it out yourself, the torrent is only a few clicks away.)
Its the legal side of things that can be tricky, assuming you're in the group of people who care about keeping legitimate (and anyone high-profile pretty much has to be or they'd be plastered all over the news in short order.)
And come on, its Bruce Willis. I don't know how big his iTunes collection is, but I somehow think he could afford to just buy his daughters a copy if that's all he cared about.
He's taking a stand on principle. I give him a giant thumbs up for that! The whole mentality of locking in and locking down needs to be fought wherever it can!
Well, then maybe he shouldn't sue Apple but the RIAA instead, because it sure isn't Apple that insisted on that clause. Which you can tell by the fact that Amazon has the same clause almost at the beginning of the ToS: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200154280 "2.1 Rights Granted. Upon payment for Music Content, we grant you a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the Music Content only for your personal, non-commercial, entertainment use, subject to the Agreement."
Last time I tried to go into an iPod and copy music off of it, it was even less accessible than music that had DRM on it. So... thanks Steve Jobs... for "freeing" my music.
Was that really _your_ music?
Since he obviously wanted to copy music from somebody else's iPod, not really.
Unless he was actually dumb enough to believe that the iPod was the perfect storage medium to store his music on - and only on it. Which on any device is a recipe for disaster on any device.
But even then there are several easy to find programs to get music off of any iDevice for quite some time now, so the actual problem seems to be something else completely - he doesn't want there to be a solution.
I bought an iPod Nano years ago and found it very difficult to work with. It was difficult because I expected to be able to transfer music onto it through the file system. No go. I sold it immediately. When someone purchases a license/copy of music they should be able to put it on as many devices as they wish.
In other words, your iPad is now a middle man between you and the system you use for developing software. Why not cut out the middle man, and save time, money, and sanity by just using that system to begin with? You can get a small, lightweight netbook running whatever OS you were connecting to over SSH if you do not like the size or weight of a typical laptop.
Yeah, I can see you before my eyes, huddled in a corner of the server room programming directly on the machine you are developing on.
If you don't have a real keyboard you don't have a real development tool - regardless of the IDE.
Someone else pointed out a more fundamental problem: you cannot write iPad software using your iPad. Even if it had a keyboard, that problem would kill the iPad as a software development platform.
The trend of apple products market share declining as Android products skyrocket in market share is akin to the tipping of Lady Justice's scales. Apple is going downhill because they haven't come out with anything actually new in quite some time(the same thing, only smaller does not count) and people who pay attention are starting to hate them for their anti-comptetitive actions on the world stage - vis a vis patent lawsuits, injoining product sales that are more unique than their own, etc.
Suuuure, the "next" iPhone will be nothing new, only smaller, and most importantly it will not sell.
How much are you willing to bet?
But lets look at "Android products skyrocket in market share" - if you take Samsung out of the picture, all other Android phones don't sell half as well as iPhones. Are you actually claiming this is either because Samsung's phones are so much better than all other Android phones, or because everybody buys them to support their fight against Apple? Samsung simply selling so many phones because they are cheap copies of iPhones is obviously not an option you would accept.
Can't we for a while at least stop ascribing a success, which is due to the hard work of a very large group of people over a long period to one man, and further look for some magical parallels where there are none?
No, because then "we" couldn't pretend that it will all stop now that he's dead.
Steve Jobs showed you a path to a phone that doesn't suck ass.
Yes, while some may debate it, I'd say SJ did bring us the first smartphone that didn't suck and that was a huge milestone. However, that was 6 years ago. After that they just iterated. Nothing really new. Nothing ground-breaking. And certainly nothing to justify the open worshipping they receive in the press. Do people have no dignity anymore?
Yeah, nothing apart from the first tablet that didn't suck and that was a huge milestone.
Samsung is one of the companies that actually makes stuff. Apple just does marketting and distribution, and does it well.
But most of all, Apple does design - "Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like," Jobs told the Times. "That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
* What the iPhone pioneered was the fully on-screen virtual keyboard. *
what the fuck man? how about nokia 7710? ever heard of that? or how about a bunch of htc's that didn't have kb's, running shitty winmo?
even if you hadn't you might have heard of p800 that had onscreen KB(that flickr link is to a p800 - one of the p800's tricks was that you could just throw away the kb flip if you didn't want it).
what happened was that capacitive and fast enough cpu's to work with cap. detection came feasible in consumer budget when iphone came out, big screens came down in price(so that it was cheaper to just put a big screen and forget wiring for a complex kb and come ahead)..
IOW, the iPhone didn't "pioneer the fully on-screen virtual keyboard", it pioneered the fully on-screen virtual keyboard that was actually useful because it wasn't hampered by both a small screen and the need for a stylus.
Yawn, The US has had design patents a century before you were born - learn to live with it, or do something more useful against them then whining on the interwebs. Or at least don't limit your whining on one company, and if you can't manage that focus on the company with the most US design patents - which would be Samsung. By far.
One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.
We need the BBC because they cling onto a dying standard and force the maker of the closed software do play that standard to keep distributing it, even when they already have open, standards formats that they distribute for other platforms?
I'm wondering how you can see the BBC in anything but a negative light here.
Well, the iOS iPlayer doesn't need Flash, and judging from the comments ("this app doesn't really do anything you can't already do via the website") the same seems to be true for Mobile Safari.
So it's clearly not "the BBC" that needs Flash, it's either the BBC's Android programmers or Android itself.
Or Surface (Either the old Big-Ass-Table, or new Tablet things). But that's missing the author's point. Those are afterthoughts, ways of getting the software out there.
Apple is a hardware company that uses software to move their hardware.
Microsoft is a software company that's now making hardware to move its software.
Sure, that's why Steve Jobs often quoted Alan Kay in saying, “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”
Because he wanted to hide the "fact" that "Apple is a hardware company that uses software to move their hardware". Sure.
Think about this: do people complain that Apple has too many software or hardware patents?
I work at a university and what I see nearly universally is that people who get Macs get VMWare or Parallels and Windows. They aren't getting a Mac because it does everything they need, they are getting a Mac because it is fashionable, and they can get Windows on it as well. While Dell may not like that, it doesn't hurt MS as long as Windows keeps getting sold.
Yeah. They aren't getting Windows or Linux "because Macs are fashionable", not because they do even less of what they want than OS X. They get "VMWare or Parallels and Windows" because there less than a handful of programs they need to use where there is no OS X (often from some dickhead professor who hates Macs or wrote his tool in the 80s and it still runs on DOS).
Heck, if Windows did all they wanted, and they just bought a Mac as a fashion statement, why don't they use Boot Camp? Are they afraid the Fashion Police comes in and sees their defaced Mac?
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Apple allows you to transfer YOUR music to at most 5 of your devices. How's that not DRM?
(Thanks Apple!)
Actually: (vi) iTunes Plus Products do not contain security technology that limits your usage of such products, and Usage Rules (ii) – (v) do not apply to iTunes Plus Products. You may copy, store, and burn iTunes Plus Products as reasonably necessary for personal, noncommercial use.
See comment below -- even DRM free, it is very time consuming and unfriendly to move MY OWN PURCHASED MUSIC from iTunes to a non-Apple device.
What's so damn time consuming and unfriendly about dragging and drop either files from the file system or, even simpler, titles directly from iTunes to the device? Esp. with smart playlists limiting the total size that makes filling a non-Apple device easier than with just about any other music management tool.
-Anyone who tried to break the DRM was sued or threatened by Apple.
Who exactly?
-eMusic was DRM free before Steve Jobs had his "open letter".
eMusic was a couple of Indie bands which nobody wanted to listen to for the most part.
Pirate Bay it is then. You can re-download as many times as you need to and you can pass it on without a problem.
Of course if you don't actually care about the law, you can do the same thing with iTunes - and there is less risk you will be caught.
as they wanted, but that it is actually the record labels and/or RIAA demanding these rules.
You are more than correct but what you fail to understand is that the RIAA did not do business with Willis. The RIAA did business with Apple and Apple did business with Willis.
Just like you don't buy your DRMed CDs from the RIAA but from the record store - I bet you never complained about the record store in any discussion about DRMed CDs, but alwais about RIAA.
Do you have any idea how much money makes on selling content and software? About 6 Billion in revenue in 2011 out of a total of 35 Billion, up from 4.2Billion in 2010. ( http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/industry/digital-and-mobile/business-matters-itunes-global-revenue-was-1005988552.story ). That's almost 20% of total revenue.
Or rather it would be 20% if the $35B weren't quarterly revenue. Annual was $108 billion. So by revenue it's more like 6%. 70% of that goes straight to the creators and rights owners.
Furthermore, Apple isn't abusing it's power since it's their store and they can do whatever they want. That's a pretty poor argument. Doing whatever you want is what entities that abuse power do. See Microsoft and the Explorer situation. It was their Operating System, they could do what ever they wanted.
No they couldn't because they already consented they wouldn't: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft#History
the Department of Justice opened its own investigation on August 21 of that year, resulting in a settlement on July 15, 1994 in which Microsoft consented not to tie other Microsoft products to the sale of Windows but remained free to integrate additional features into the operating system. In the years that followed, Microsoft insisted that Internet Explorer (which, in addition to OEM versions of Windows 95, appeared in the Plus! Pack sold separately[1][2]) was not a product but a feature which it was allowed to add to Windows, although the DOJ did not agree with this definition.
Paying extra for fancy hardware with a fancy name attached to it is one thing. But we aren't talking about that. We're talking about selling people music that's DRM-protected and non-transferable.
So put your scorn where it belongs - RIAA. Unless you are just being an asshole yourself.
More likely the fact that everything under the sun comes with a EULA or ToS specifying that its non-transferable.
The technical side of breaking DRM hasn't historically been a big problem (even if you can't figure it out yourself, the torrent is only a few clicks away.)
Its the legal side of things that can be tricky, assuming you're in the group of people who care about keeping legitimate (and anyone high-profile pretty much has to be or they'd be plastered all over the news in short order.)
And come on, its Bruce Willis. I don't know how big his iTunes collection is, but I somehow think he could afford to just buy his daughters a copy if that's all he cared about.
He's taking a stand on principle. I give him a giant thumbs up for that! The whole mentality of locking in and locking down needs to be fought wherever it can!
Well, then maybe he shouldn't sue Apple but the RIAA instead, because it sure isn't Apple that insisted on that clause. Which you can tell by the fact that Amazon has the same clause almost at the beginning of the ToS: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200154280 "2.1 Rights Granted. Upon payment for Music Content, we grant you a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the Music Content only for your personal, non-commercial, entertainment use, subject to the Agreement."
Last time I tried to go into an iPod and copy music off of it, it was even less accessible than music that had DRM on it. So... thanks Steve Jobs... for "freeing" my music.
Was that really _your_ music?
Since he obviously wanted to copy music from somebody else's iPod, not really.
Unless he was actually dumb enough to believe that the iPod was the perfect storage medium to store his music on - and only on it. Which on any device is a recipe for disaster on any device.
But even then there are several easy to find programs to get music off of any iDevice for quite some time now, so the actual problem seems to be something else completely - he doesn't want there to be a solution.
I bought an iPod Nano years ago and found it very difficult to work with. It was difficult because I expected to be able to transfer music onto it through the file system. No go. I sold it immediately. When someone purchases a license/copy of music they should be able to put it on as many devices as they wish.
So what does one thing have to do with the other?
In other words, your iPad is now a middle man between you and the system you use for developing software. Why not cut out the middle man, and save time, money, and sanity by just using that system to begin with? You can get a small, lightweight netbook running whatever OS you were connecting to over SSH if you do not like the size or weight of a typical laptop.
Yeah, I can see you before my eyes, huddled in a corner of the server room programming directly on the machine you are developing on.
If you don't have a real keyboard you don't have a real development tool - regardless of the IDE.
Someone else pointed out a more fundamental problem: you cannot write iPad software using your iPad. Even if it had a keyboard, that problem would kill the iPad as a software development platform.
+5 Shortsightful - First IPad Game Written in Codea on the IPad Hits the App Store
The trend of apple products market share declining as Android products skyrocket in market share is akin to the tipping of Lady Justice's scales. Apple is going downhill because they haven't come out with anything actually new in quite some time(the same thing, only smaller does not count) and people who pay attention are starting to hate them for their anti-comptetitive actions on the world stage - vis a vis patent lawsuits, injoining product sales that are more unique than their own, etc.
Suuuure, the "next" iPhone will be nothing new, only smaller, and most importantly it will not sell.
How much are you willing to bet?
But lets look at "Android products skyrocket in market share" - if you take Samsung out of the picture, all other Android phones don't sell half as well as iPhones. Are you actually claiming this is either because Samsung's phones are so much better than all other Android phones, or because everybody buys them to support their fight against Apple? Samsung simply selling so many phones because they are cheap copies of iPhones is obviously not an option you would accept.
Can't we for a while at least stop ascribing a success, which is due to the hard work of a very large group of people over a long period to one man, and further look for some magical parallels where there are none?
No, because then "we" couldn't pretend that it will all stop now that he's dead.
Steve Jobs showed you a path to a phone that doesn't suck ass.
Yes, while some may debate it, I'd say SJ did bring us the first smartphone that didn't suck and that was a huge milestone. However, that was 6 years ago. After that they just iterated. Nothing really new. Nothing ground-breaking. And certainly nothing to justify the open worshipping they receive in the press. Do people have no dignity anymore?
Yeah, nothing apart from the first tablet that didn't suck and that was a huge milestone.
Samsung is one of the companies that actually makes stuff. Apple just does marketting and distribution, and does it well.
But most of all, Apple does design - "Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like," Jobs told the Times. "That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
* What the iPhone pioneered was the fully on-screen virtual keyboard. *
what the fuck man? how about nokia 7710? ever heard of that? or how about a bunch of htc's that didn't have kb's, running shitty winmo?
even if you hadn't you might have heard of p800 that had onscreen KB(that flickr link is to a p800 - one of the p800's tricks was that you could just throw away the kb flip if you didn't want it).
what happened was that capacitive and fast enough cpu's to work with cap. detection came feasible in consumer budget when iphone came out, big screens came down in price(so that it was cheaper to just put a big screen and forget wiring for a complex kb and come ahead)..
IOW, the iPhone didn't "pioneer the fully on-screen virtual keyboard", it pioneered the fully on-screen virtual keyboard that was actually useful because it wasn't hampered by both a small screen and the need for a stylus.
As I pointed out - why not go against those with the most design patents? Because they are not Apple? Fanboy alert.
Yawn, The US has had design patents a century before you were born - learn to live with it, or do something more useful against them then whining on the interwebs. Or at least don't limit your whining on one company, and if you can't manage that focus on the company with the most US design patents - which would be Samsung. By far.
How exactly does this group know that a baby is going to be a warrior or a philosopher when it is not even a year old?
What baby? There is no baby involved when you are reincarnated as a divine being in the sky.
They seek nothing less than a complete monopoly on the smart phone market.
"Good artists copy, great artists steal" - Steve Jobs, 1994
Yawn. He quoted Picasso, who "stole" from T.S.Eliot: http://nancyprager.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/good-poets-borrow-great-poets-steal/
One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.
We need the BBC because they cling onto a dying standard and force the maker of the closed software do play that standard to keep distributing it, even when they already have open, standards formats that they distribute for other platforms?
I'm wondering how you can see the BBC in anything but a negative light here.
Well, the iOS iPlayer doesn't need Flash, and judging from the comments ("this app doesn't really do anything you can't already do via the website") the same seems to be true for Mobile Safari.
So it's clearly not "the BBC" that needs Flash, it's either the BBC's Android programmers or Android itself.
Or Surface (Either the old Big-Ass-Table, or new Tablet things). But that's missing the author's point. Those are afterthoughts, ways of getting the software out there. Apple is a hardware company that uses software to move their hardware. Microsoft is a software company that's now making hardware to move its software.
Sure, that's why Steve Jobs often quoted Alan Kay in saying, “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”
Because he wanted to hide the "fact" that "Apple is a hardware company that uses software to move their hardware". Sure.
Think about this: do people complain that Apple has too many software or hardware patents?
I work at a university and what I see nearly universally is that people who get Macs get VMWare or Parallels and Windows. They aren't getting a Mac because it does everything they need, they are getting a Mac because it is fashionable, and they can get Windows on it as well. While Dell may not like that, it doesn't hurt MS as long as Windows keeps getting sold.
Yeah. They aren't getting Windows or Linux "because Macs are fashionable", not because they do even less of what they want than OS X. They get "VMWare or Parallels and Windows" because there less than a handful of programs they need to use where there is no OS X (often from some dickhead professor who hates Macs or wrote his tool in the 80s and it still runs on DOS).
Heck, if Windows did all they wanted, and they just bought a Mac as a fashion statement, why don't they use Boot Camp? Are they afraid the Fashion Police comes in and sees their defaced Mac?