It sounds like all you need to be able to do is feed bogus info to the RIAA to justify the fee they're giving you, and they'll sue you even though it can be proven you've never been on the P2P networks.
She's guilty of something! Hell, for sure she must have memorized some tune and played it in her brain without paying a fee. She owes us for just thinking about it. Her brain illegally recorded it.
Clinton is a charming charismatic man, and as a Governor and then President was surrounded by women who were political groupies--and aggressive ones at that, who made it plain that they were available anytime, any place.
Monica Lewinsky was keen to have Clinton do her. She got miffed only after his staff started blocking her access to Clinton and finally moved to a job outside the White House. She wasn't sexually harassed by Clinton, but sexually denied.
From what I gather, Prince had a world-wide marketing deal in place that would have distributed his CD to UK record stores, but greed inspired the UK distributors to stay out unless they could get a higher percentage. It seems like distributors everywhere else plan to get some profit by going with the deal in their regions, and the UK distributors would have got a bit of profit as well.
Now they're not going to get anything. Prince doesn't like leeches trying to blackmail him like this. So everyone in the UK who gets a copy of the MAIL gets the CD. Blackmail me, will you, you putzes? Take that! Maybe he will be seen as a kind of Guy Fawkes of the music distribution system with this little bombshell, inspiring other big artists to do the same and knock the current corrupt system in the UK.
But it's also a shot across the bows of distributors everywhere. Come to think of it, hasn't Paul MacCartney done something similar with his recent CD, at least in terms of bypassing the usual distribution outlets?
If the recounting of the evidence against him is accurate: Wife boffing S&M admitted murderer boyfriend, wife and boyfriend robbing seriously socially challenged geek hubby blind, wife filing for divorce, wife disappearing (I doubt ex-wives like this amazing piece of work stick around their ex-husbands), no body, no murder weapon, no evidence of any crime--a washed car with a missing passenger seat is weird, but not evidence of a crime--just a drop of blood, and suspicious books purchased AFTER ex-wife's vanishing act (aren't those usually acquired BEFORE a nefarious deed)--if all this is more or less accurate despite its utter zaniness, I'd say there plenty of "reasonable doubt" that the dude committed any crime.
Of course, the case could always go to court. Prosecutors have been known to try cases on such thin evidence. But unless the guy actually stood up in court and confessed to doing it, I doubt that any reasonable jury would convict the him. There is just way too much doubt. It's more likely that the case will get kicked over to Missing Persons, where it will stay unless something more concrete as evidence shows up.
I've never believed my printer when it reports that it's time to change ink cartridges. Invariably there's anywhere from 100-200 pages worth of text to be had out of a supposedly empty cartridge. I just keep printing until the cartridge has really emptied itself, figuring that wasting one or two sheets of paper is cheaper than the ink I'd otherwise waste if I believed the alerts. I've known this for years. and it has been the case with Epson, Hewlett-Packard, and Canon printers.
The interest the printer companies have is just to bilk consumers for as much as possible by overcharging for cartridges, preventing users from refilling them with lower cost ink, and and misrepresenting how much ink is left so people will spend even more for more overpriced cartridges. It's a real racket. As a moment's thought should tell most people, the real money in the printer business isn't the printers but the ink. If you do a lot of printing--and teachers like myself do--you notice that within a year you will spend at least twice the cost and as much as three or four times the cost of the printer on ink, depending on whether you have a basic printer or a multifunction one.
Well, there have been well over a million downloads of Safari for Windows at this point, which leads me to believe that Windows users are curious. I think most of them also realize it's a Beta, not a general Ready for Prime Time release, so they don't expect perfection.
And in any case, Apple isn't out to win a browser war. There isn't a war, or even any battles. Apple's tilling the ground for the release of the iPhone with its Safari-like browser and web apps, and it wants to make sure that Windows developers start checking their web sites for compatibility issues. If a lot of people decide the like Safari, that's great, but it's not the priority at the moment.
As for all of that other claptrap about starry-eyed Apple Mac users drifiting in a dreamy utopia, the man knows nothing beyond the sleek, stylish ads that apple runs if he thinks that's the world that Mac users inhabit. They are anything but bucolic.
If I don't want your mail, I just flag it as spam and my built-in junk filter forever after will send your mail marked read to my Junk folder, which automatically erases its contents after 48 hours. If for some reason I decide that I want your mail after all, I rescue it from the Junk folder. I don't need AOL or any ISP protecting me from you.
Usually, I will use the opt-out link at the bottom of your message (if I see that you are legitimate) and ask you to take me off your list. If you're an honest business, you'll do that.
Buy used versions. The precursor to Creative Suite was Design Suite. All of its apps--Acrobat 6, InDesign 2, Photoshop 7, and Illustrator 10--do a fine job. Sure, the newer versions have the most up-to-date improvements and bell-and-whistles, and no doubt added features that make life easier for designers (we hope), but the older stuff still has plenty of gumption. Their output is fine for production work.
And used copies are cheap. I say all of this by way of saying that I think of a realistic alternative to the Adobe products.
MS Office of all flavors Mac or Windows is terrible for document creation if your target is to have the document content go from file to PDF to press. LaTeX is specifically designed to produce content that can go directly PDFs that can be used by Linotronic offset presses with minimal or no intermediary cleaning up. MS Word fills PDFs with an enormous amount of useless formatting shite that has to be flushed from the document before its usable.
But this is not the rationale behind Science and Nature giving the thumbs down to Word 2007. Office's new equation editor abandons the MathML standard, which means equations cannot be reliably edited across platforms or word processors. Compensating for this key incompatibility is more trouble than its worth at the editorial and production end.
My guess is that MS doesn't care. The scientific and technical documents market doesn't compare to the rest of the corporate documents market, so MS will likely just say tough, get with our program.
Quite the contrary: the right to protect your creative work via copyrights and patents from people like you who seem to think the creative folks don't have that right is constitutionally protected. That's the way it should be. It is constitutionally protected precisely because the framers recognized that if people could not make a living from their ideas and works of art. Why should artists spend years working on material if people are going to appropriate the results of the artist's work without paying for it?
The hard part is determining when this right is being violated, and how to remedy it. The current Copyright laws have become too complicated, and I think actually encourage violating the law. They also do not protect the rights of the individual artist so much as they protect the commercial interests of large corporations, which tirelessly seek ways to steal the work of artists for themselves.
Maybe Steve Jobs saw this and thought, "Way Cool, what can we do to help boost sales and sell even more iPods in another niche market?"
Answer: sue them.
Guaranteed instant free publicity. Sex shops selling iPods. Once upon a time in the USA, publishers used to seek out getting their books banned in Boston so they could slap "Banned in Boston" on the cover. It always assured X percent increase in book sales.
If this warning by Dick Armey is real, then it's FUD to pressure people into pressuring their reps to vote down sales taxes applied to purchases made over the internet. Why, the next you know, they COULD start taxing e-mail IF an evil sales tax is allowed.
Emphasis is on the subjunctive.
Freedom of information and the right to know who your accusers are makes such a service perfectly legal, and I suspect that if challenged in court, the challenge would fail--as much as a judge might hate having to agree. Open societies should be loathe to conceal accusers too efficiently if only because it can quickly lead to abuses (or rather, make abuses easier to commit and hide) popularly associated with totalitarian societies.
On the other hand, witnesses and informants do need to be protected from criminals who would do whatever they could to either silence them or exact revenge after their day in court. Otherwise, few will be willing to stand up and bear witness or tip law enforcement about impending crimes or crimes in process. We do exercise such non-disclosure policies where doctors, lawyers, and priests (and in many places, even journalists) are allowed to refuse the disclosure of any information divulged in confidence. Likewise, the courts also allow the excision of names and other information from public records in cases that involve national security.
If this data service is exploiting a flaw in the system, then perhaps it's time that confidentiality laws extend to the names of witnesses and informants.
Where have you been? In some places, you already have to pay for merely existing in a certain space, if you exist there longer than a certain period of time. It's called residency tax--and if not that, user fees. If you decide to be nomadic, you still have to pay. They're called fines for vagrancy, loitering, having no visible means of support, what ever. Everyone pays for their existence at some point.
It's FUD (also stands for eff you delay/dummy) tactic. A marketing trick. Dell is shipping laptops with Ubuntu, and M$ isn't getting a slice of that pie for OEM Vista, and it is in a huff.
Antsy companies and governmental agencies on the verge of switching to crossplatform FOSS (whether servers, OS's, or user friendly file formats) will see lights flashing and hear sirens, and back off until their legal departments can sort this out for the next year, which means M$ gets to continue raking it in for service contracts and forced system upgrades.
Private users don't need to worry about being sued. Huge institutional users do. Even if they were certain they could win in court, they could still wind up in costly court battles just to prove what anyone with sense already knows--that this is M$ FUD.
M$ is certainly looking into the vista of the future, and the vista does not look good for M$. Their global OS empire is turning flaky around the edges and cracking at the core. Their FUDing us now to assure a cash flow in the near term.
In the meantime, wouldn't be entertaining if M$ blew off its OS, embraced a Unix flavor, and hyped service until its collective ears bled brains? Apple did.
As I see it, M$ is playing the RIAA and SCO cards. Users of OSS might start getting bills for infringement in amounts small enough that typical consumers will pay because it's cheaper than fighting it in court. M$ covers it legal costs plus a small profit.
On the other hand, maybe its claimed patent infringements result in court rulings that nullify patent after patent because said patents cover what is "obvious" and therefore unpatentable in the first place. In the short term, M$ may actually make a bundle, but in the long term will so alienate a customer base that M$ will wither.
Linux and OpenOffice.org must be seriously undermining M$'s business...
General purpose webcasting can move off shore, but anything focused on the local community (a la public broadcasting) with audiences measuring only thousands will be sunk at the music streaming end.
And I wouldn't be so sure about those who move off shore. I can see laws or regulatory measures put in place in the USA that would force the blocking of all "off shore" net broadcasters who did not comply with US regulatory requirements.
Hmmm. The kid was seven years old when, playing with the computer, she clicked a download button. Right now she's 10 years old.
Young teen. Right.
While I believe right and wrong should be taught at an early age, the RIAA, lawyers, and a courtroom drama are way over the top for a seven-year-old who probably didn't know what she was doing at time. It's on the order of a kid swiping a piece of candy at the store. You give her a slap on the wrist and make her apologize to the president of the company or the artists who did the song, and promise never to do it again. (Maybe they'll feel so damned cheap and embarrassed they'll put leashes on their attack hounds.) You don't pour tens of thousands of dollars into making the kid out to be a criminal pirate.
Maybe it's this sort of thing that's partly behind the slump in CD sales. Disgusted consumers aren't buying as a form of quite protest. If they aren't, they should be.
You mean people actually BELIEVE these ratings issued by a company that has a vested interest in selling security software? Obviously, Symantec is still keen to spook Mac and Linux users into buying its redundant software.
Maybe the guy was sacked because he ripped off the 1984 Ridley Scott Apple Mac ad, though maybe he thought he was just ripping off the derivative iPod ad. Maybe the company wants to avoid having Apple go after it for stealing most of the video and keeping the guy on after he was outed could be taken to mean the company was behind it.
As for the political huff, what can any Democrat possibly expect from other Democrats? Party officials and Congressional reps have already forgotten that their favorite pastime, internecine intra-party back-biting, is what lost them the House and Senate in 1992. I guess self-destructive behavior over single-issue navel-gazing represents a return to happy days are here again.
I won't be surprised if they get the crap kicked out of them again in the next round of Senate and House elections.
I'm not a lawyer and have difficulty understanding Legalese, but doesn't this sort of orchestrated fictionalization and avoidance of answering questions qualify as some kind of contempt of court? It struck me that SCO's attorneys had no respect whatever for the judge or the process. Redacted to its essence, I could hear a snotty voice intoning, "NYAH-nyah-NYAH-nyah-nyah!"
Or does the judge have to put up with this kind of bratty behavior?
The EU Consumer Affairs Minister is right--it is unreasonable. But it's not Apple's (or MS's, or Real's) fault. It's the music labels' fault. They require the DRMs or they will not license their music for download. Instead of beating up on Apple, she should beat-up on the RIAA and its corresponding international rights agencies.
While she's at it, she might ask why oh why the labels require DRM for downloads, but sell DRM-free music on their CDs? As Steve Jobs noted a few weeks ago, the record labels are the single largest source of DRM-free music available on the internet. Of course, we all know too well why the labels don't protect their CD tracks with DRM: if they did, suddenly tens of millions of CD players would stop working, and there would be hundreds of millions of unhappy (or perhaps homicidal) music customers.
But Apple and the iTunes Music Store are the 1000-pound gorilla filling most of the room and make an easy target. Why bother the labels about their licensing practices? Let's also leave Real and Microsoft out of the picture for doing the same as Apple (again, because the labels require it).
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like all you need to be able to do is feed bogus info to the RIAA to justify the fee they're giving you, and they'll sue you even though it can be proven you've never been on the P2P networks.
She's guilty of something! Hell, for sure she must have memorized some tune and played it in her brain without paying a fee. She owes us for just thinking about it. Her brain illegally recorded it.
Clinton is a charming charismatic man, and as a Governor and then President was surrounded by women who were political groupies--and aggressive ones at that, who made it plain that they were available anytime, any place.
Monica Lewinsky was keen to have Clinton do her. She got miffed only after his staff started blocking her access to Clinton and finally moved to a job outside the White House. She wasn't sexually harassed by Clinton, but sexually denied.
From what I gather, Prince had a world-wide marketing deal in place that would have distributed his CD to UK record stores, but greed inspired the UK distributors to stay out unless they could get a higher percentage. It seems like distributors everywhere else plan to get some profit by going with the deal in their regions, and the UK distributors would have got a bit of profit as well. Now they're not going to get anything. Prince doesn't like leeches trying to blackmail him like this. So everyone in the UK who gets a copy of the MAIL gets the CD. Blackmail me, will you, you putzes? Take that! Maybe he will be seen as a kind of Guy Fawkes of the music distribution system with this little bombshell, inspiring other big artists to do the same and knock the current corrupt system in the UK. But it's also a shot across the bows of distributors everywhere. Come to think of it, hasn't Paul MacCartney done something similar with his recent CD, at least in terms of bypassing the usual distribution outlets?
If the recounting of the evidence against him is accurate: Wife boffing S&M admitted murderer boyfriend, wife and boyfriend robbing seriously socially challenged geek hubby blind, wife filing for divorce, wife disappearing (I doubt ex-wives like this amazing piece of work stick around their ex-husbands), no body, no murder weapon, no evidence of any crime--a washed car with a missing passenger seat is weird, but not evidence of a crime--just a drop of blood, and suspicious books purchased AFTER ex-wife's vanishing act (aren't those usually acquired BEFORE a nefarious deed)--if all this is more or less accurate despite its utter zaniness, I'd say there plenty of "reasonable doubt" that the dude committed any crime.
Of course, the case could always go to court. Prosecutors have been known to try cases on such thin evidence. But unless the guy actually stood up in court and confessed to doing it, I doubt that any reasonable jury would convict the him. There is just way too much doubt. It's more likely that the case will get kicked over to Missing Persons, where it will stay unless something more concrete as evidence shows up.
I've never believed my printer when it reports that it's time to change ink cartridges. Invariably there's anywhere from 100-200 pages worth of text to be had out of a supposedly empty cartridge. I just keep printing until the cartridge has really emptied itself, figuring that wasting one or two sheets of paper is cheaper than the ink I'd otherwise waste if I believed the alerts. I've known this for years. and it has been the case with Epson, Hewlett-Packard, and Canon printers.
The interest the printer companies have is just to bilk consumers for as much as possible by overcharging for cartridges, preventing users from refilling them with lower cost ink, and and misrepresenting how much ink is left so people will spend even more for more overpriced cartridges. It's a real racket. As a moment's thought should tell most people, the real money in the printer business isn't the printers but the ink. If you do a lot of printing--and teachers like myself do--you notice that within a year you will spend at least twice the cost and as much as three or four times the cost of the printer on ink, depending on whether you have a basic printer or a multifunction one.
Well, there have been well over a million downloads of Safari for Windows at this point, which leads me to believe that Windows users are curious. I think most of them also realize it's a Beta, not a general Ready for Prime Time release, so they don't expect perfection.
And in any case, Apple isn't out to win a browser war. There isn't a war, or even any battles. Apple's tilling the ground for the release of the iPhone with its Safari-like browser and web apps, and it wants to make sure that Windows developers start checking their web sites for compatibility issues. If a lot of people decide the like Safari, that's great, but it's not the priority at the moment.
As for all of that other claptrap about starry-eyed Apple Mac users drifiting in a dreamy utopia, the man knows nothing beyond the sleek, stylish ads that apple runs if he thinks that's the world that Mac users inhabit. They are anything but bucolic.
Hmmm. Something tells me this judge believes in the ghost in the machine.
Hey, shouldn't insider trading be a feature of the game? :-)
If I don't want your mail, I just flag it as spam and my built-in junk filter forever after will send your mail marked read to my Junk folder, which automatically erases its contents after 48 hours. If for some reason I decide that I want your mail after all, I rescue it from the Junk folder. I don't need AOL or any ISP protecting me from you.
Usually, I will use the opt-out link at the bottom of your message (if I see that you are legitimate) and ask you to take me off your list. If you're an honest business, you'll do that.
Buy used versions. The precursor to Creative Suite was Design Suite. All of its apps--Acrobat 6, InDesign 2, Photoshop 7, and Illustrator 10--do a fine job. Sure, the newer versions have the most up-to-date improvements and bell-and-whistles, and no doubt added features that make life easier for designers (we hope), but the older stuff still has plenty of gumption. Their output is fine for production work.
And used copies are cheap. I say all of this by way of saying that I think of a realistic alternative to the Adobe products.
MS Office of all flavors Mac or Windows is terrible for document creation if your target is to have the document content go from file to PDF to press. LaTeX is specifically designed to produce content that can go directly PDFs that can be used by Linotronic offset presses with minimal or no intermediary cleaning up. MS Word fills PDFs with an enormous amount of useless formatting shite that has to be flushed from the document before its usable.
But this is not the rationale behind Science and Nature giving the thumbs down to Word 2007. Office's new equation editor abandons the MathML standard, which means equations cannot be reliably edited across platforms or word processors. Compensating for this key incompatibility is more trouble than its worth at the editorial and production end.
My guess is that MS doesn't care. The scientific and technical documents market doesn't compare to the rest of the corporate documents market, so MS will likely just say tough, get with our program.
Quite the contrary: the right to protect your creative work via copyrights and patents from people like you who seem to think the creative folks don't have that right is constitutionally protected. That's the way it should be. It is constitutionally protected precisely because the framers recognized that if people could not make a living from their ideas and works of art. Why should artists spend years working on material if people are going to appropriate the results of the artist's work without paying for it? The hard part is determining when this right is being violated, and how to remedy it. The current Copyright laws have become too complicated, and I think actually encourage violating the law. They also do not protect the rights of the individual artist so much as they protect the commercial interests of large corporations, which tirelessly seek ways to steal the work of artists for themselves.
Maybe Steve Jobs saw this and thought, "Way Cool, what can we do to help boost sales and sell even more iPods in another niche market?"
Answer: sue them.
Guaranteed instant free publicity. Sex shops selling iPods. Once upon a time in the USA, publishers used to seek out getting their books banned in Boston so they could slap "Banned in Boston" on the cover. It always assured X percent increase in book sales.
These days its lawsuits.
If this warning by Dick Armey is real, then it's FUD to pressure people into pressuring their reps to vote down sales taxes applied to purchases made over the internet. Why, the next you know, they COULD start taxing e-mail IF an evil sales tax is allowed. Emphasis is on the subjunctive.
Freedom of information and the right to know who your accusers are makes such a service perfectly legal, and I suspect that if challenged in court, the challenge would fail--as much as a judge might hate having to agree. Open societies should be loathe to conceal accusers too efficiently if only because it can quickly lead to abuses (or rather, make abuses easier to commit and hide) popularly associated with totalitarian societies.
On the other hand, witnesses and informants do need to be protected from criminals who would do whatever they could to either silence them or exact revenge after their day in court. Otherwise, few will be willing to stand up and bear witness or tip law enforcement about impending crimes or crimes in process. We do exercise such non-disclosure policies where doctors, lawyers, and priests (and in many places, even journalists) are allowed to refuse the disclosure of any information divulged in confidence. Likewise, the courts also allow the excision of names and other information from public records in cases that involve national security.
If this data service is exploiting a flaw in the system, then perhaps it's time that confidentiality laws extend to the names of witnesses and informants.
Where have you been? In some places, you already have to pay for merely existing in a certain space, if you exist there longer than a certain period of time. It's called residency tax--and if not that, user fees. If you decide to be nomadic, you still have to pay. They're called fines for vagrancy, loitering, having no visible means of support, what ever. Everyone pays for their existence at some point.
It's FUD (also stands for eff you delay/dummy) tactic. A marketing trick. Dell is shipping laptops with Ubuntu, and M$ isn't getting a slice of that pie for OEM Vista, and it is in a huff.
Antsy companies and governmental agencies on the verge of switching to crossplatform FOSS (whether servers, OS's, or user friendly file formats) will see lights flashing and hear sirens, and back off until their legal departments can sort this out for the next year, which means M$ gets to continue raking it in for service contracts and forced system upgrades.
Private users don't need to worry about being sued. Huge institutional users do. Even if they were certain they could win in court, they could still wind up in costly court battles just to prove what anyone with sense already knows--that this is M$ FUD.
M$ is certainly looking into the vista of the future, and the vista does not look good for M$. Their global OS empire is turning flaky around the edges and cracking at the core. Their FUDing us now to assure a cash flow in the near term.
In the meantime, wouldn't be entertaining if M$ blew off its OS, embraced a Unix flavor, and hyped service until its collective ears bled brains? Apple did.
Yeah, wishful thinking...
You're forgetting Microsoft and SCO. They'll have OSS covered for patent violations. They've got you coming and going. :-)
As I see it, M$ is playing the RIAA and SCO cards. Users of OSS might start getting bills for infringement in amounts small enough that typical consumers will pay because it's cheaper than fighting it in court. M$ covers it legal costs plus a small profit.
On the other hand, maybe its claimed patent infringements result in court rulings that nullify patent after patent because said patents cover what is "obvious" and therefore unpatentable in the first place. In the short term, M$ may actually make a bundle, but in the long term will so alienate a customer base that M$ will wither.
Linux and OpenOffice.org must be seriously undermining M$'s business...
General purpose webcasting can move off shore, but anything focused on the local community (a la public broadcasting) with audiences measuring only thousands will be sunk at the music streaming end.
And I wouldn't be so sure about those who move off shore. I can see laws or regulatory measures put in place in the USA that would force the blocking of all "off shore" net broadcasters who did not comply with US regulatory requirements.
Hmmm. The kid was seven years old when, playing with the computer, she clicked a download button. Right now she's 10 years old.
Young teen. Right.
While I believe right and wrong should be taught at an early age, the RIAA, lawyers, and a courtroom drama are way over the top for a seven-year-old who probably didn't know what she was doing at time. It's on the order of a kid swiping a piece of candy at the store. You give her a slap on the wrist and make her apologize to the president of the company or the artists who did the song, and promise never to do it again. (Maybe they'll feel so damned cheap and embarrassed they'll put leashes on their attack hounds.) You don't pour tens of thousands of dollars into making the kid out to be a criminal pirate.
Maybe it's this sort of thing that's partly behind the slump in CD sales. Disgusted consumers aren't buying as a form of quite protest. If they aren't, they should be.
You mean people actually BELIEVE these ratings issued by a company that has a vested interest in selling security software? Obviously, Symantec is still keen to spook Mac and Linux users into buying its redundant software.
Maybe the guy was sacked because he ripped off the 1984 Ridley Scott Apple Mac ad, though maybe he thought he was just ripping off the derivative iPod ad. Maybe the company wants to avoid having Apple go after it for stealing most of the video and keeping the guy on after he was outed could be taken to mean the company was behind it. As for the political huff, what can any Democrat possibly expect from other Democrats? Party officials and Congressional reps have already forgotten that their favorite pastime, internecine intra-party back-biting, is what lost them the House and Senate in 1992. I guess self-destructive behavior over single-issue navel-gazing represents a return to happy days are here again. I won't be surprised if they get the crap kicked out of them again in the next round of Senate and House elections.
I'm not a lawyer and have difficulty understanding Legalese, but doesn't this sort of orchestrated fictionalization and avoidance of answering questions qualify as some kind of contempt of court? It struck me that SCO's attorneys had no respect whatever for the judge or the process. Redacted to its essence, I could hear a snotty voice intoning, "NYAH-nyah-NYAH-nyah-nyah!" Or does the judge have to put up with this kind of bratty behavior?
The EU Consumer Affairs Minister is right--it is unreasonable. But it's not Apple's (or MS's, or Real's) fault. It's the music labels' fault. They require the DRMs or they will not license their music for download. Instead of beating up on Apple, she should beat-up on the RIAA and its corresponding international rights agencies.
While she's at it, she might ask why oh why the labels require DRM for downloads, but sell DRM-free music on their CDs? As Steve Jobs noted a few weeks ago, the record labels are the single largest source of DRM-free music available on the internet. Of course, we all know too well why the labels don't protect their CD tracks with DRM: if they did, suddenly tens of millions of CD players would stop working, and there would be hundreds of millions of unhappy (or perhaps homicidal) music customers.
But Apple and the iTunes Music Store are the 1000-pound gorilla filling most of the room and make an easy target. Why bother the labels about their licensing practices? Let's also leave Real and Microsoft out of the picture for doing the same as Apple (again, because the labels require it).