Ignorance of the limitations of something you are using is not an excuse. Apple makes it very clear what you can and can't do with your music. No one is being tricked into buying music with iTunes.
OK, don't buy music from these companies. There, that wasn't very hard, was it?
Also, let me add that "forcing on their customers" is a bit like saying that Microsoft is "forcing windows on windows users." People know the limitations of the DRM ahead of time, and if they're willing to accept it, how can you say that anything is being forced on them? OMG Ford forced 4 wheels and a gas pedal on me when I bought my SUV!@# What ever will I do!@#?
I'm sure it is. The only copy of OS X for x86 available right now is the one provided to developers with the x86 dev boxes. I'm almost certain that it's against the rules of the NDA to talk about it publicly like this.
Suing someone to stop them from doing something sometimes means they actually don't want anyone to do it. Apple has a very obvious reason to keep OS X off of generic PCs, and I'm sure they're happy to flex a little muscle when someone obviously broke their NDA and provided OS X x86 to someone else, gave a public demo of it, or provided info on it.
When you're talking about a mtn-top to mtn-top connection, the beam width is very VERY narrow, and the only people that would have to really worry about would be someone in line-of-sight (a plane) or someone near the antenna (on the mountain.) Otherwise, there's no reason to worry about it any more than a normal network.
"So then Real broke the law because they didn't get what they wanted. Boo hoo for Real."
What law has Real broken? The DRM has been reverse engineered expressly for interoperability. There is no law being broken here. And the DRM wasn't even reverse engineered to break a copyright at all! In fact, it was reverse engineered for the purposes of CREATING DRM, not breaking it. (or at least, the appearance of it.)
"That's irrelevant to the news story at hand which is only about Real basing their business model on a very-likely illegal strategy."
You seem stuck on the fact that Real broke a law (although I see you are now qualifying it as "likely"), care to tell me which one? They didn't "break" FairPlay for the purposes of getting around a copyright. In fact, Nothing Real is doing breaks anyone's copyright. Apple did not patent all DRM on all portable devices. Because Real's implementation of FairPlay is cleanroomed, Apple (or whoever they license FairPlay from) has no claim that their copyright was violated.
"The iPod was designed to play encrypted music only if it was encrypted by Apple. Real is free to negotiate with Apple for the legal right to use their DRM"
Oh, this is fucking rich. You're actually saying that when you buy an iPod, you agree to only play encrypted music from Apple? Where did I agree to that? And what legal basis to Apple has to limit how its product is used. You're barking up the wrong tree here, the iPod's ability to play DRM'd music from another source is not limited by any law or contract that any user agrees to. Do I have to ask Apple to put a file on the iPod with a format it was not designed for? No. Does Real? No.
Answer this: If I can flip one bit of a protected WMA file in order to make it work on my iPod, can Apple sue me for playing it on my iPod? Can they sue me for "breaking" WMA's DRM? Can Microsoft?
So again, which law has Real broken? You'll notice from this story and many others that almost everyone who knows what they are talking about agrees that Real is pretty much in the clear on this one.
"In all my posts on this, I haven't said or even hinted at whether I think Apple is right or wrong."
You've said repeatedly that Real is doing something illegal. (Implying that suing Real would be OK since they are breaking the law.) So I'll ask you straight up: Does Apple have the right to sue Real.
That's all well and good, but they didn't have any legal obligation to do that, nor are they breaking any laws by working with the iPod the way they are now.
Apple has the right to break Real's way of doing it, and Real has the right to make their songs play on the iPod. The question of whether Real should have done it another way when it comes to customer choice, fair use, open source ethics, etc. etc. is beside the point. Apple should not be suing them, and hopefully won't.
You're essentially saying that anyone who makes a consumable product for a non-consumable device that they themselves do not make is a wannabe. Real wants its products to be available on a certain device (iPod). The same way that a record store wants to sell CDs that work on a regular CD player. Is the record store being a wannabe by not selling their own CD players?
Are you incapable of admitting that Apple is wrong and Real is right?
Because (believe it or not) Real wants to provide something for its customers. They want to sell songs, and they want to make them work with the iPod, since there are tons of iPods out there. By supporting a popular product, they expect to sell more songs. QED. (And they should be able to, IMO, and even according to the law. This type of reverse engineering is specifically protected by the DMCA.)
"Can't they find another way to make money?"
Same could be said for Apple. Can't they make money from the iPods and be happy? No company should be kept from selling something legally simply because the competition doesn't want them to.
Most likely, yes. It would be a bit like taking the master recordings that Sony owns the rights to distribute and going out on the street corner selling CDs. While it might common sense that the artist has a right to sell their music how they want to, but that's not the way things are done in "the industry" and not the way contracts work. Although there might be some little loophole in their contracts, I'm sure big expensive teams of lawyers are working through the details as we speak.
Interesting, I suppose they could replace the normal mouse with these and ship them in single-button mode by default, that would have the same result as shipping a one-button mouse. It would be nice to see them as the default mouse for iMacs/G5s.
It will only end the trolls if they ship this mouse with every machine... which I don't think they will be. A one-button mouse will still be standard, and you can still buy two-button ones. Nothing has changed.
"A friend of DRM" is painting with a VERY broad brush. Oh, right, I forgot this is slashdot and anyone that supports DRM of any kind can not be trusted.
Apple has never given any indication that they want to open up DRM on OS X to anyone other than themselves for their own services, and they have always fought to give people the absolute maximum use of the content they own. If Sony asked Apple to restrict DVD playback to "approved" monitors, I'm pretty certain Apple would tell them to fuck off. If Apple was going to farm out its DRM system for fun and profit, they would have by now.
Of course, someone will compare the iPod to this, and the fact that you can't play iTunes songs on anything other than an "approved" MP3 player. The difference with this, again, is that there is a very specific service being offered with iTunesMS/iPod, and not a system-wide DRM architecture offered to any content provider. Not to mention the fact that you can burn CDs and do plenty of other things to play/use the content.
Apple did not create AAC. (Dolby Labs did)
AAC does not have DRM. (Apple's DRM only applies to content from their store, not all AAC files.) Apple could easily apply its DRM to pretty much any codec.
Saying that AAC is related to content protection at all is just pure unmitigated bullshit. I'm starting to think you don't know what you're talking about.
Apple has not licensed its DRM to anyone, and there is no DRM in the system itself except for its own products (specifically the iTunes Music Store.) I think the chances of the Monitors pref pane ever having a "security" tab are nil. Go sell your FUD elsewhere.
God, I'm sick of comments like these. Guess what? I hardly ever print too. I bought a printer this year because my girlfriend wanted one. I never use it, and I rarely print things at work.But I don't feel the need to mention it every time someone talks about new printer technology.
"Hay guyz, check out this new car!"
"Fuck cars, I ride my bike."
"Hay guyz, check out this new bike!"
"Fuck bikes, I walk."
"Hay guyz, check out this new printer"
"Fuck printers, I email people"
That's the point. They are traveling between two oil towns. It would be like staging an anti-nuke march between 3 mile island and chernobyl. (obviously not possible, but you get the idea.) Or having a defense-of-marriage march through the middle of the Castro district.
Hahaha, Who's the idiot?
Ignorance of the limitations of something you are using is not an excuse. Apple makes it very clear what you can and can't do with your music. No one is being tricked into buying music with iTunes.
Also, let me add that "forcing on their customers" is a bit like saying that Microsoft is "forcing windows on windows users." People know the limitations of the DRM ahead of time, and if they're willing to accept it, how can you say that anything is being forced on them? OMG Ford forced 4 wheels and a gas pedal on me when I bought my SUV!@# What ever will I do!@#?
When I was at Apple, the phrase I heard often was "We didn't buy NeXT, we paid them to take over."
I'm sure it is. The only copy of OS X for x86 available right now is the one provided to developers with the x86 dev boxes. I'm almost certain that it's against the rules of the NDA to talk about it publicly like this.
Suing someone to stop them from doing something sometimes means they actually don't want anyone to do it. Apple has a very obvious reason to keep OS X off of generic PCs, and I'm sure they're happy to flex a little muscle when someone obviously broke their NDA and provided OS X x86 to someone else, gave a public demo of it, or provided info on it.
When you're talking about a mtn-top to mtn-top connection, the beam width is very VERY narrow, and the only people that would have to really worry about would be someone in line-of-sight (a plane) or someone near the antenna (on the mountain.) Otherwise, there's no reason to worry about it any more than a normal network.
What law has Real broken? The DRM has been reverse engineered expressly for interoperability. There is no law being broken here. And the DRM wasn't even reverse engineered to break a copyright at all! In fact, it was reverse engineered for the purposes of CREATING DRM, not breaking it. (or at least, the appearance of it.)
"That's irrelevant to the news story at hand which is only about Real basing their business model on a very-likely illegal strategy."
You seem stuck on the fact that Real broke a law (although I see you are now qualifying it as "likely"), care to tell me which one? They didn't "break" FairPlay for the purposes of getting around a copyright. In fact, Nothing Real is doing breaks anyone's copyright. Apple did not patent all DRM on all portable devices. Because Real's implementation of FairPlay is cleanroomed, Apple (or whoever they license FairPlay from) has no claim that their copyright was violated. "The iPod was designed to play encrypted music only if it was encrypted by Apple. Real is free to negotiate with Apple for the legal right to use their DRM" Oh, this is fucking rich. You're actually saying that when you buy an iPod, you agree to only play encrypted music from Apple? Where did I agree to that? And what legal basis to Apple has to limit how its product is used. You're barking up the wrong tree here, the iPod's ability to play DRM'd music from another source is not limited by any law or contract that any user agrees to. Do I have to ask Apple to put a file on the iPod with a format it was not designed for? No. Does Real? No.
Answer this: If I can flip one bit of a protected WMA file in order to make it work on my iPod, can Apple sue me for playing it on my iPod? Can they sue me for "breaking" WMA's DRM? Can Microsoft?
So again, which law has Real broken? You'll notice from this story and many others that almost everyone who knows what they are talking about agrees that Real is pretty much in the clear on this one.
"In all my posts on this, I haven't said or even hinted at whether I think Apple is right or wrong."
You've said repeatedly that Real is doing something illegal. (Implying that suing Real would be OK since they are breaking the law.) So I'll ask you straight up: Does Apple have the right to sue Real.
Apple has the right to break Real's way of doing it, and Real has the right to make their songs play on the iPod. The question of whether Real should have done it another way when it comes to customer choice, fair use, open source ethics, etc. etc. is beside the point. Apple should not be suing them, and hopefully won't.
You're essentially saying that anyone who makes a consumable product for a non-consumable device that they themselves do not make is a wannabe. Real wants its products to be available on a certain device (iPod). The same way that a record store wants to sell CDs that work on a regular CD player. Is the record store being a wannabe by not selling their own CD players?
Are you incapable of admitting that Apple is wrong and Real is right?
"Can't they find another way to make money?"
Same could be said for Apple. Can't they make money from the iPods and be happy? No company should be kept from selling something legally simply because the competition doesn't want them to.
Most likely, yes. It would be a bit like taking the master recordings that Sony owns the rights to distribute and going out on the street corner selling CDs. While it might common sense that the artist has a right to sell their music how they want to, but that's not the way things are done in "the industry" and not the way contracts work. Although there might be some little loophole in their contracts, I'm sure big expensive teams of lawyers are working through the details as we speak.
You stay away from my gap filler, you sick freak! I don't get down like that.
I've got your dangling gap filler right here! *grabs crotch*
Interesting, I suppose they could replace the normal mouse with these and ship them in single-button mode by default, that would have the same result as shipping a one-button mouse. It would be nice to see them as the default mouse for iMacs/G5s.
It will only end the trolls if they ship this mouse with every machine... which I don't think they will be. A one-button mouse will still be standard, and you can still buy two-button ones. Nothing has changed.
You're just pathetic if you dismiss rap/hiphop wholesale because it "doesn't have a melody."
That's the sound of all this going straight over your head.
Pro tip: they don't take themselves seriously.
Buy, buy, buy!
Good to know.
Apple has never given any indication that they want to open up DRM on OS X to anyone other than themselves for their own services, and they have always fought to give people the absolute maximum use of the content they own. If Sony asked Apple to restrict DVD playback to "approved" monitors, I'm pretty certain Apple would tell them to fuck off. If Apple was going to farm out its DRM system for fun and profit, they would have by now.
Of course, someone will compare the iPod to this, and the fact that you can't play iTunes songs on anything other than an "approved" MP3 player. The difference with this, again, is that there is a very specific service being offered with iTunesMS/iPod, and not a system-wide DRM architecture offered to any content provider. Not to mention the fact that you can burn CDs and do plenty of other things to play/use the content.
Apple did not create AAC. (Dolby Labs did) AAC does not have DRM. (Apple's DRM only applies to content from their store, not all AAC files.) Apple could easily apply its DRM to pretty much any codec.
Saying that AAC is related to content protection at all is just pure unmitigated bullshit. I'm starting to think you don't know what you're talking about.
Apple has not licensed its DRM to anyone, and there is no DRM in the system itself except for its own products (specifically the iTunes Music Store.) I think the chances of the Monitors pref pane ever having a "security" tab are nil. Go sell your FUD elsewhere.
"Hay guyz, check out this new car!" "Fuck cars, I ride my bike."
"Hay guyz, check out this new bike!" "Fuck bikes, I walk."
"Hay guyz, check out this new printer" "Fuck printers, I email people"
Shut up.
That's the point. They are traveling between two oil towns. It would be like staging an anti-nuke march between 3 mile island and chernobyl. (obviously not possible, but you get the idea.) Or having a defense-of-marriage march through the middle of the Castro district.
Come on now, everyone learned in Zombie 101 that when you take out the head, the zombie is toast.
And some might say that comparing Bulgaria to Missouri is harsh.