According to TFA, it's no big deal to see either of the sanctions individually (overturning a jury verdict / making counsel pay), but rare to see both happen at once.
The plaintiff carried out part of the case on its own, then fired its internal lawyers and brought in an outside firm. According to the judge, the outside lawyers knew that the case was meritless from the moment they took it, but decided to try and game the legal system anyway. The fact that his ruling was upheld on appeal means they must have been pushing pretty hard.
Meanwhile, a dozen stories away on the Slashdot main page is an item about Apple and Starbucks getting sued over "gift cards sold at a brick & mortar POS and used to buy things on the internet."
Patents can be just as much for defensive purposes as offensive ones, and you can bet your ass that if some patent troll found a way to claim patent rights over a fundamental piece of the iPhone interface we'd see another "umpty-billion dollar lawsuit against Apple" story on the/. front page again. The injunction that forced RIM to take down the Blackberry network -- thus screwing customers and hurting the product even though the issue hadn't been decided against RIM yet -- was the stuff of patent troll wet dreams, and there are plenty of people who want a piece of action like that.
Xerox had a pen-based (aka: gestural) input system called 'Unistrokes', Palm used something similar, and Xerox sued. The court ruled with Xerox, so Palm replaced Graffiti with another pen-based input system (a Jot variant) which it licensed from CIC. Palm appealed, and the appeals court upheld the ruling of infringement while passing the question of whether Xerox's original patent was valid back down for a separate ruling. In 2004, the lower court found that the Xerox patent was indeed valid despite Palm's claims of existing prior art, and Palm paid Xerox $22.5M in retroactive licensing fees.
Note that Jot existed for licensing even while Palm was getting sued over Graffiti. There's more subtlety in these things than just "trying to patent the double click."
You know precisely squat about the American legal system, don't you?
In point of fact, there is exactly one way for any party to ask the courts to give their opinion of what's legal and what isn't: filing a lawsuit. And in this case, Apple hasn't even gone that far. All they've done so far is send a letter to Harmony saying, "we think what you're doing infringes our rights, and if you keep doing it we're willing to take the matter in front of a judge."
By itself, that letter holds little or no legal value. It certainly hasn't been endorsed by any court. About all it does is prevent a defendant from saying, "I was ambushed.. if they'd only asked me to stop, I would have," when the matter actually does appear in front of a judge. And since there's absolutely no legal force behind this kind of C&D letter -- not even an immediate threat of a lawsuit -- the courts don't give a flying shit what they say.
Now, if Apple had actually filed a bogus lawsuit simply to harass the defendant, that is illegal: It's called barratry. And the courts have no problem slapping down plaintiffs who can be proved to have engaged in that... and their attorneys... and the attorney's legal firm.
Whether you like it or not, though, Apple is on the side of the angels here, at least in terms of legal fitness. Stripping the DRM off a purchased song when you already hold a legitimate key is a legal grey area, and Apple hasn't pushed too hard on that question. Cryptographic attacks that make it possible for someone to unlock a track even if they don't hold a legitimate key are gonna be pretty hard to defend in court. So there's a legitimate question as to whether the tools are legal at all. Apple has contracts with the labels which require Apple to watch out for this kind of thing, and Apple faces contract penalties or harder negotiations on future contracts if the labels decide Apple isn't working hard enough to guard the barn door. So Apple stands to be injured if the tools are illegal and the distributor keeps handing them out. That means Apple has 'standing' to sue.
So when Apple's lawyers wrap those two facts up in a letter and say, "the fastest and easiest way for you not to hurt us in a way that would lead to us suing for damages is to stop distributing the tools," that's frickin' polite.
When you finally grow out of thinking C&D letters are a form of extortion, you'll see that they're a proper and necessary part of a legal system with many players who hold diverse interests. It isn't Harmony's responsibility to check every possible law and every possible player in the market and bulletproof themselves against any suggestion of stepping on someone's before deciding what to do next. They're free to do their thing, and if Apple sees a legal issue, it's Apple's responsibility to A) discover the problem and B) let Harmony know that there might be a problem.
The proper response to such a letter is to have your own lawyer talk to Apple's lawyers and work out a solution that makes everyone happy. The C&D letter is a request to start a conversation about legal matters where both parties have an interest, and to work out a compromise where both sides can move forward with as many of their own legitimate interests intact as possible.
For all we know, Apple's lawyers might tell Harmony, "according to our engineers, changing these bits of the program right here would put you completely in the clear.. of course we're not allowed to say that in public for fear of reprisals from the record labels. But legal conversations are privileged and you'd be able to subpoena the information from us if we went to court anyway, so what the heck." That's unlikely, but at least give Apple the chance to have a conversation before pumping bricks out your ass over how they're such big mean stinky poopyheads.
I would personally find it funny as hell if Apple had distributed individual keys to ADC members (MD5 of username, password, and a random number or something), and all people posting this key were building a ten-mile-high billboard that tells Apple just exactly who violated their NDA.
Apple has already said that iPhone application signing isn't a DRM measure, it's an accountability measure for developers. They don't care who writes code for the iPhone, they just want to make it a little easier to prevent malware and/or make it easier to track down the people who write it.
And while I appreciate the mental exercise involved in a good piece of reverse-engineering, this whole "independent iPhone/touch SDK" project strikes me as pretty much moot since the official SDK will come out in the next few weeks.
---- If iTunes' private keys could be found, third-party apps and hardware could quickly replace Apple sales,
What the heck are you talking about? To the extent that Apple does use encryption to move data from one device to another (and I don't happen to know of such a thing), the keys would have to be there in the hardware and extracting them would be feasible, if not trivial. If there was a key exchange protocol, that could be reverse-engineered and duplicated. Keeping a cryptosystem secure involves keeping either the either the key or the algorithm secret. But any device capable of decrypting anything has to have both the key and the algorithm, or it won't work. That's the fundamental lesson about cryptography that the RIAA and MPAA have spent ten years and tens of millions of dollars failing to learn.
Apple doesn't compete on lock-in. It competes on seamless user experience. Lots of people have voted with their dollars to say that they like having a product whose hardware, firmware, sync utilities, and network services were all designed by the same company, and actually work together. They like the idea of knowing who to blame if one of those pieces goes wrong, as opposed to the "it wasn't me, it was him" finger-pointing game you get from products that nominally adhere to some published standard.
Besides, knock-on products like AirTunes and the Apple TV generate only a fraction of revenue for Apple compared to the iPod -- which was just reported yesterday at $181 per unit for 22 million units and change shipped last quarter.
---- Apple could provide a Framework for iPod interaction, but it doesn't - that's not open to third parties. This closes out reasonable competition for the sake of their music store. . . .
The fact that Apple doesn't devote resources to publishing and maintaining an SDK hasn't stopped the groups above from putting out products that manage an iPod without a user even needing to install iTunes. The fact that you apparently didn't know they existed says something about the overwhelming demand for such products in the general market.
If Apple truly wanted to lock out such products, it would be easy for them to run the syncing process through a home-grown encryption tool for which they hold a patent. That would make any other product that worked an automatic infringement of the patent, and any attempt to circumvent the encryption a violation of the DMCA.
As for limiting DTrace, I think it's most likely that Apple's decision is based on its contractual agreements with the movie studios who just signed up to provide rentals. Those are the guys who demand that HD content remain in encrypted and unobservable channels from disc to screen. Granted the rental files aren't HD, but they are exploding media, to keep the Apple offerings more or less channel-neutral with pay-per-view cable, and I don't think the MPAA would be happy about a tool that allows people to snoop the video channel as it passes through iTunes.
---- They're probably not going to get into a DOJ tiff over it, though . . .
*sigh*
There are plenty of alternative sources for digital music, almost all of which will play on an iPod and be indexed by iTunes. The ones that don't are formats the market isn't beating down Apple's door to support (Ogg), or which require licensing fees (WMA). All the MP3s you've bought from Amazon play on an iPod. All the tracks you import from a CD will play on an iPod. The iTunes store is a convenience for iPod owners, not a necessity.
Besides, the standard operational definition of a monopoly is that a company can raise prices without losing sales, because consumers don't have credible alternatives. So far, Apple's behavior with regard to pricing is to fight against price increases.
There are credible alternatives to the iPod for people who want a digital music player. There are credible alternatives to the iTunes store for people who want to buy digital music. There are credible ways to get music without a digital music player. Apple has the leading products in the digital music player market, and is one of the leading outlets for digital music, but there is a big-ass difference between being a market leader and being a monopolist engaging in anticompetitive behavior, and the DOJ's attitude toward market leaders in competitive markets is "don't bother me, I have real work to do."
Most likely, Apple's intent is to deliver a 'credible effort' to prevent circumvention and/or reverse engineering.
Even though the labels have largely dropped DRM, they still don't like the idea of users having control over digital music. It's part of their DNA. Their whole business revolved around having control over the production and distribution systems, and they just can't contemplate existence without having control over something. The contracts between Apple and the labels reflect that fear, with Apple having the job of making it look like the horses are still in the barn even though the door is open.
Now technically, that's impossible. But my experience with corporate software development has shown me that you can balance 'customers who don't want to know what's impossible' with judicious use of handwavium. You don't have to build a solution that's bulletproof, you just need something that works most of the time. It doesn't matter if there are workarounds, or even if those workarounds are practically trivial for anyone with a technical background, as long as you can't discuss the workaround without using technical terms.
It's sort of an extension of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It's not that your customers can't think about the problem if you lack the vocabulary, it's more that they won't want to think about the problem if they have to spend effort learning how to discuss it intelligently.
So from a contractual standpoint, providing a 'credible effort' is more about obfuscation than actually trying to do the impossible. Apple probably doesn't care if people can work around this issue, as long as the explanation boils down to 'blah blah blah' to aggressively uninformed label executives.
No. That one's been tried before. This is a different flavor of stupid.
This one is about Apple 'actively disabling' WMA on the iPod in order to (illegally) bolster Apple's own AAC format.
Trouble is, the whole argument is bullshit. First of all, WMA is a proprietary format, not an open one, so there's a question about whether could even use WMA without paying Microsoft royalties. Then there's the fact that commercially-sold music comes with a DRM wrapper around whatever audio format actually encodes the music. And we know for damnsure that Microsoft licenses its DRM.
So the only 'competitors' being hurt under the terms defined in this lawsuit are outfits that sell non-DRM'd WMA, assuming that Apple could play non-DRM'd WMA without having to license those audio codecs from Microsoft. And AFAIK, there isn't much action in that part of the market.
And even if there were companies out there selling non-DRM'd WMA, the plaintiff would have to show some compelling reason why they couldn't also sell non-DRM'd AAC (which does play on the iPod) or plain MP3s (which also play on the iPod) if selling iPod-compatible music is so important to them.
A minor quibble: I don't know the exact chronology, but I've bought any number of Plus tracks from the iTunes store, and it seems to me that the price went down to $0.99/track before Amazon's digital music outlet became big news.
You're mistaking Apple's FairPlay DRM for the AAC format.
AAC is an open standard and most digital music players on the market today support it. As long as you have non-FairPlay AAC tracks, you should be able to use them on almost any player.
And by a strange coincidence, you can buy non-FairPlay AAC tracks from the iTunes store (at a higher bitrate than the DRM'd ones) for exactly the same price as the DRM'd ones. At least, you can as long as the label that owns the tracks has agreed to let Apple sell the tracks without DRM.
Even if you do have a library of FairPlay tracks, you have multiple options for converting them. The easiest is to burn the music to CD and then re-import it, but some people don't like that because the decode-and-reencode shuffle reduces the quality of the music. So there are free programs out there that will strip the DRM off any track as long as you have a legitimate key. Those produce non-DRM'd AAC tracks with no loss of sound quality.
Apple isn't the company demanding DRM on every track.
And getting back to the point of the original article, correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't Apple have to pay licensing fees to play tracks that use Microsoft's DRM? I mean, plain non-DRM WMA is all well and good, but how much non-DRM WMA is out there commercially? This is an antitrust lawsuit after all, so 'tracks I ripped from CDs I already own' don't count. There's no commercial interest competing with the iTunes store, there.
Only sales outlets that supply non-DRM WMA would have standing to sue, and even then, they'd have to show a compelling reason why they only sell non-DRM WMA and not non-DRM AAC.
For that matter, since I'm not an audio-format-licensing geek, can Apple even use non-DRM WMA without paying a licensing fee to Microsoft? Sure the chip has the capacity to decode WMA, but that doesn't automatically mean Apple can use the capacity without paying for it.
The Osborne Effect: what happens when consumers are so 'well informed' about upcoming products that it puts the company out of business.
Let's also consider Microsoft's long-standing "Real Soon Now" policy for killing competing products. 'Inform the consumers' that MS will release something "just as good" in the near future, and that it's silly to go with another vendor when all your business software is currently from MS, and you can pretty much wipe out a company with a good product.
Beyond that, consumer markets have this thing called 'first mover advantage'. There's some serious dollar value to opening up a new market so fast that the competition has to run like hell just to get a shoe in the door. Leak the specs for an upcoming project far enough in advance, and any company in an even vaguely similar line of business can have a me-too product ready to go on the shelves about the same time as your debut. The end result is that nobody makes enough money to make the new market seem worthwhile, and the whole thing lapses back into nothingness in about six months.
There are lots of cases where a large number of people who make 'well informed' decisions in their best interest end up making things worse for themselves and everyone else. See: The Tragedy of the Commons.
Besides, the whole idea of 'informed, rational consumers' is pretty much fantasy anyway. If such creatures existed, most people wouldn't have some gadget in their kitchen that they haven't used even once since they bought it. We also wouldn't see billions of dollars every year rewarding the software industry's de facto policy of 'whoever has the longest list of bullet points wins'.
The line you cite isn't from the APA itself. It's from Schedule 1.1(a) - Assets. Section 1.1 of the APA reads:
Purchase and Sale of Assets. On the terms and subject to the
conditions set forth in this Agreement, Seller will sell, convey,
transfer, assign and deliver to Buyer and Buyer will purchase and
acquire from Seller on the Closing Date (as defined in Section 1.7), all
of Seller's right, title and interest in and to the assets and
properties of Seller relating to the Business (collectively the
"Assets") identified on Schedule 1.1 (a) hereto. Notwithstanding the
foregoing, the Assets to be so purchased shall not include those assets
(the "Excluded Assets") set forth on Schedule 1.1 (b)
Note that last line:
Notwithstanding the foregoing, the Assets to be so purchased shall not include those assets (the "Excluded Assets") set forth on Schedule 1.1 (b)
The plain language of the contract says that Schedule 1.1(a) doesn't tell the whole story. It must be limited by the assets excluded in Schedule 1.1(b). And if we look at Schedule 1.1(b), we see the following:
Schedule 1.1(b) Excluded Assets (Page 2 of 2)
V. Intellectual Property:
A. All copyrights and trademarks, except for the trademarks UNIX and
UnixWare.
In short, SCO 'owned' the source code of UNIX and UnixWare the way you or I 'own' a book. The physical block of paper and ink is ours to do with as we please, but buying a copy of the latest Harry Potter book doesn't give me the right to start licensing Harry Potter merchandise.
Oh God.. not another case of 'Apple has a monopoly on Macs'-itis.
Yes, Apple has a monopoly on Macs: it's called a trademark. Dell has a monopoly on Dells; the Coca Cola Corporation has a monopoly on Coke.
A trademark is a federally created and enforced monopoly that allows consumers to associate specific products with specific vendors. It exists to define competition between different vendors in the same market. It has nothing to do with a single company locking in so much of a given market that it can dictate terms to consumers, or engaging in anticompetitive behavior to keep other vendors from getting enough market share to make price- and feature-competition relevant again.
Microsoft has a monopoly on Zunes (for all the good it does them)
You don't define a market in terms of a single company's product. You define a market in terms of all products that fill the same general consumer need. BMW is part of the automobile market. Coke is part of the soft drink market. Oreos are part of the snack foods market. Rolexes are part of the timepiece market. Zunes are part of the protable music player market.
Macs are part of the personal computer market, competing with Windows machines and desktop Linux.
Apple found out that it didn't like 'allied' companies cherry-picking customers from the highest-margin segment of its market, using machines that were only nominally compliant with Apple's specs. I know that from firsthand experience, having done tech support for some of those machines back in the day.
The cloning experiment proved quite clearly that licensing the OS to other companies did absolutely nothing to increase Apple's slice of the market. All it did was force Apple to compete with its own 'partners' for the most profitable chunk of the same slice.
---- The 'product' here is aggregated stuff that flows in _after_ it has been placed online elsewhere
No, the 'product' is the service of aggregating all that content in one place, so you don't have to trawl all over the net looking for new places to get your snark on.
Aggregation doesn't just happen. It takes back-end tools to select, organize, and present all that 'stuff that flows in'. The Slashdot team wrote the software, built the database, and maintains the network that keeps it all going. They also have a ten-year track record of selecting and aggregating stuff that geeks find reasonably interesting. If you think that's trivial or easy, go right ahead and start your own aggregation service. We'll see where you stand ten years from now.
The number of attack vectors for Windows counters that argument.
As the anecdotal reports here on Slashdot demonstrate, not every Windows box is vulnerable to a given worm/trojan/virus/etc. Some pieces of malware target older versions of the OS. Some attack specific services. Some go after specific applications. Some get caught due to the widespread use of anti-malware in the Windows environment.
Each exploitable segment is only a fraction of the total Windows installed base, and some of those segments are probably smaller than the Mac installed base. And yet those holes get exploited, even with all the awareness of malware that Windows users have acquired over the years. If Mac users are truly that much more vulnerable simply because of "it hasn't happened yet so it never will" reasoning, one would expect a Mac exploit to hit roughly the same number of machines as a specific Windows exploit. It would be hard to argue that the number of exposed Macs would be at least an order of magnitude smaller than any currently-exploited Windows vulnerability.
And besides, like I said, botnet managers don't care about the efficiency of a given exploit. They're all about spray-and-pray. Given the resources we know to be out there right now, DDOSing security researchers, and the historical pattern of viruses that hit hard and fast, there's nothing to prevent an attack from hitting enough Macs to be noteworthy within only a few hours.
And once again, given all the "calls to arms" that paint Mac users as smug and unaware of the danger -- if not actively in denial that any danger exists -- you'd expect a longer grace period for a Mac attack simply because it would take longer for the Mac community to acknowledge the risk and develop an effective response. We don't have nearly as much experience with malware detection and recovery as Windows users do.
---- as someone above already pointed out, if you have a group of people whose operating system was designed to be "user friendly" (i.e. generally made for less technically inclined folk) they are less likely to pay attention to the possibility of an infection.
You haven't used OS X much, have you?
There's a difference between what you refer to as 'user friendly' and what Larry Wall calls a 'well Huffman-coded system'. I.e.: it makes common and safe things easy, while making the rare and risky things more difficult. Want to save a copy of an image you saw on a webpage? Just click on it and drag the semitransparent proxy to the desktop. The OS handles the logic necessary to create a file of the appropriate type with an appropriate name. Simple.
Want to download a piece of software from the internet? That takes more steps. First you have to download and open the disk image. Now, I agree with pretty much everyone with a mind to security that the 'Open "safe" files after downloading' option in Safari should be eliminated, or turned off as the factory default at the very least, but even if you do let the thing open automatically, the OS identifies it as code which has never run on the system. It pops up a dialog explaining that you've never run this piece of software before, tells you where it came from, and asks for confirmation. If it tries to install anything outside the user's home directory, you get another dialog that asks for an administrator password.
That's a lot more complicated than most interaction people have with OS X. The design team made the good decision to keep challenges for the admin password rare, and to restrict them to "you do know you're tinkering with the guts of this machine, yes?" events, so the system doesn't encourage users to get into a habit of blindly punching in the admin password and clicking 'Okay'.
Now, the trojan under discussion admits to being an installer, it just lies about what's being installed. If more third-party developers embraced the "To install, drag the icon from this disk to your desktop" model of installation, instead of clinging to the idea that they have to spray files to hell and gone throughout the file tree, even that vector for social engineering would be harder to exploit.
---- A Mac virus won't spread via the 'net because the odds of a random connection leading to another Mac is much smaller than hitting a PC.
Would people please get over the idea that you need an infected Mac to infect another Mac?
An exploit is a package of bytes. Period. You can send that packet of bytes from any machine running any OS, to any machine running any OS. My NetBSD servers get any number of probes that could compromise a suitably-(mis)configured Windows box. Botnet managers don't lovingly hand-craft their networks. They send out a huge number of attacks to potential targets, and collect the ones that succeed. If 99.9% of those attacks fail, who cares? It's not like they're paying for the bandwidth, hardware, or electricity.
If there was a vulnerability in the Mac OS that could turn the machine into another component of a botnet without requiring user interaction, the people creating botnets would be on it like buzzards on a shit-wagon. There is absolutely no technical limitation which would prevent the Storm Worm botnet from launching an attack against Macs if the chance of getting any returns at all made it worth the effort. So far, the security practices OS X has inherited from its Unix predecessors -- which grew up in an untrusted network environment -- have kept that from happening. The whole dick-measuring thing of comparing installed bases is utterly irrelevant.
---- I doubt you will find an article about a webcomic in a newspaper unless it is notable.
This raises what I consider to be a fundamental question about Wikipedia's notability standards, though.
Howard Tayler cites 293,781 referrals to his site for the month of September. And that's just referrals, not unique page hits. There are magazines and newspapers that don't have that kind of circulation. By what standard do the Wikipedia admins decide something of interest to more than a quarter million people per month is 'not noteworthy', while Wikipedia boasts unique pages for minor characters from video games?
From my reading in the threads of discussion about this issue (including the proposed deletion of Brian McNeil's Wikinews page covering the subject -- an exercise in irony if I ever saw one), it seems to me that Wikipedia's admins still have their heads set in the notability standards of pre-internet institutions. An issue cited in print is notable. A blog post (or a webcomic with north of a quarter million referrals per month) might be axed simply for not having that 'old media cachet'.
The mechanism of information distribution is changing, guys. News is becoming decentralized. The major news organs no longer set the baseline for breaking news or depth of coverage. They're the places that do a 30-second distillation of something that's been hot online for the past week.
IMnHO, the notion of deleting pages for their adherence to a half-unwritten set of 'notability' standards seems like a lousy way to decide what to keep. By definition, it puts the decision of what shall be seen in the hands of a select few, and grossly inflates those people's opinion of what's 'noteworthy'. It's a textbook case of selection bias.. users don't get to see pages the admins deem 'not noteworthy', so there's no evidence to challenge Administrative Wisdom. On one hand, you have a general demand for information in the public which we can call 'what people want to know'. On the other hand, you have a Wikipedia admin's mental model of 'what people want to know'. You'd have to come up with one hell of an argument to convince me that the correlation between those two is significant enough to justify appointing those people as the gatekeepers of what people are allowed to see.. especially when it comes to edge cases like subjects which appeal to a select population.
If you want to apply 'the wisdom of crowds' to the question of what's worth keeping in Wikipedia, take new pages from anyone who wants to add them, then do a cull based on usage on every anniversary of the page's most recent edit. Pages that receive no traffic for a year get deleted. That's how libraries cull their collections, BTW, except they generally use a 'no checkouts in the last ten years' standard.
In other words, let the community decide what the community wants to see, and what the community considers to have lasting value.
---- I can just say "surprise me" and receive an essentially endless flow of music that I happen to like because I put it there.
My first point is that there's a certain amount of effort on your part just "putting it there," and that assembling a truly large library involves a lot of work. My second point is that the more stuff you put there, the less likely it is that you'll hear any given song. Try buying a new album and loading it onto your MP3 player, then listening to a random selection of songs for a month. What are the odds that you'll have heard every song on that new album?
---- What they can do about that I don't really know.
Well, the thing that seems to be working best right now is to get rid of the middleman. A lot of artists sell their stuff directly, skipping that whole "label keeps all but $0.12 per song" business. I can see a day coming when labels don't actually take possession of the music they distribute, and don't have exclusive rights to the stuff they sell.
Another model that makes sense to me would be for artists to fund their next album on preorders instead of advance money from the labels. The artists put their pitch materials on a website -- lyrics, demo tracks, what have you -- then set a series of financial milestones that will trigger further development: at $500, we post all the lyrics for all the songs that we'll produce; at $1500, we'll post melody tracks; at $3000, we'll post rehearsal tracks; at $6000 we ship. Pay as much as you want up front, and you can keep adding to your contribution as you go. Anyone who pays $1 or more gets to download a copy before we release the discs for general sale. Anyone who pays more than $5 gets the download and a pre-release copy of the disc. Anyone who pays more than $25 gets the extra-special not-released-for-general-sale art and the disc will be signed by everyone involved. Anyone who pays more than $50 gets the download, the pre-release disc, the art, and as much other merch as we can shove in the box. Etcetera.
Neither of those is particularly good for the labels, but it seems to me they could combine the subscription service with a direct purchase plan. Sign up for the subscription and explore the library, and build the music equivalent of a Netflix waiting list. After three months, we'll start giving you downloadable copies of the stuff in that list.. say five songs a month on a $10 subscription.
That seems to me to be the best compromise between subscription and outright purchase. It gives users freedom to explore new stuff at very little cost, and also gives them a way to build their own library of stuff they want to hear over and over again.
Slashdot Mirror
According to TFA, it's no big deal to see either of the sanctions individually (overturning a jury verdict / making counsel pay), but rare to see both happen at once.
The plaintiff carried out part of the case on its own, then fired its internal lawyers and brought in an outside firm. According to the judge, the outside lawyers knew that the case was meritless from the moment they took it, but decided to try and game the legal system anyway. The fact that his ruling was upheld on appeal means they must have been pushing pretty hard.
Meanwhile, a dozen stories away on the Slashdot main page is an item about Apple and Starbucks getting sued over "gift cards sold at a brick & mortar POS and used to buy things on the internet."
/. front page again. The injunction that forced RIM to take down the Blackberry network -- thus screwing customers and hurting the product even though the issue hadn't been decided against RIM yet -- was the stuff of patent troll wet dreams, and there are plenty of people who want a piece of action like that.
Patents can be just as much for defensive purposes as offensive ones, and you can bet your ass that if some patent troll found a way to claim patent rights over a fundamental piece of the iPhone interface we'd see another "umpty-billion dollar lawsuit against Apple" story on the
On a much more relevant note, look at the lawsuit between Xerox and Palm over Graffiti.
Xerox had a pen-based (aka: gestural) input system called 'Unistrokes', Palm used something similar, and Xerox sued. The court ruled with Xerox, so Palm replaced Graffiti with another pen-based input system (a Jot variant) which it licensed from CIC. Palm appealed, and the appeals court upheld the ruling of infringement while passing the question of whether Xerox's original patent was valid back down for a separate ruling. In 2004, the lower court found that the Xerox patent was indeed valid despite Palm's claims of existing prior art, and Palm paid Xerox $22.5M in retroactive licensing fees.
Note that Jot existed for licensing even while Palm was getting sued over Graffiti. There's more subtlety in these things than just "trying to patent the double click."
You know precisely squat about the American legal system, don't you?
... and their attorneys ... and the attorney's legal firm.
In point of fact, there is exactly one way for any party to ask the courts to give their opinion of what's legal and what isn't: filing a lawsuit. And in this case, Apple hasn't even gone that far. All they've done so far is send a letter to Harmony saying, "we think what you're doing infringes our rights, and if you keep doing it we're willing to take the matter in front of a judge."
By itself, that letter holds little or no legal value. It certainly hasn't been endorsed by any court. About all it does is prevent a defendant from saying, "I was ambushed.. if they'd only asked me to stop, I would have," when the matter actually does appear in front of a judge. And since there's absolutely no legal force behind this kind of C&D letter -- not even an immediate threat of a lawsuit -- the courts don't give a flying shit what they say.
Now, if Apple had actually filed a bogus lawsuit simply to harass the defendant, that is illegal: It's called barratry. And the courts have no problem slapping down plaintiffs who can be proved to have engaged in that
Whether you like it or not, though, Apple is on the side of the angels here, at least in terms of legal fitness. Stripping the DRM off a purchased song when you already hold a legitimate key is a legal grey area, and Apple hasn't pushed too hard on that question. Cryptographic attacks that make it possible for someone to unlock a track even if they don't hold a legitimate key are gonna be pretty hard to defend in court. So there's a legitimate question as to whether the tools are legal at all. Apple has contracts with the labels which require Apple to watch out for this kind of thing, and Apple faces contract penalties or harder negotiations on future contracts if the labels decide Apple isn't working hard enough to guard the barn door. So Apple stands to be injured if the tools are illegal and the distributor keeps handing them out. That means Apple has 'standing' to sue.
So when Apple's lawyers wrap those two facts up in a letter and say, "the fastest and easiest way for you not to hurt us in a way that would lead to us suing for damages is to stop distributing the tools," that's frickin' polite.
When you finally grow out of thinking C&D letters are a form of extortion, you'll see that they're a proper and necessary part of a legal system with many players who hold diverse interests. It isn't Harmony's responsibility to check every possible law and every possible player in the market and bulletproof themselves against any suggestion of stepping on someone's before deciding what to do next. They're free to do their thing, and if Apple sees a legal issue, it's Apple's responsibility to A) discover the problem and B) let Harmony know that there might be a problem.
The proper response to such a letter is to have your own lawyer talk to Apple's lawyers and work out a solution that makes everyone happy. The C&D letter is a request to start a conversation about legal matters where both parties have an interest, and to work out a compromise where both sides can move forward with as many of their own legitimate interests intact as possible.
For all we know, Apple's lawyers might tell Harmony, "according to our engineers, changing these bits of the program right here would put you completely in the clear.. of course we're not allowed to say that in public for fear of reprisals from the record labels. But legal conversations are privileged and you'd be able to subpoena the information from us if we went to court anyway, so what the heck." That's unlikely, but at least give Apple the chance to have a conversation before pumping bricks out your ass over how they're such big mean stinky poopyheads.
The standard cliche is that human-level AI has been "about twenty years away" for the past 40 years.
Looks like Kurtzweil has fearlessly taken the banner and advanced that to "60 years".
I would personally find it funny as hell if Apple had distributed individual keys to ADC members (MD5 of username, password, and a random number or something), and all people posting this key were building a ten-mile-high billboard that tells Apple just exactly who violated their NDA.
Apple has already said that iPhone application signing isn't a DRM measure, it's an accountability measure for developers. They don't care who writes code for the iPhone, they just want to make it a little easier to prevent malware and/or make it easier to track down the people who write it.
And while I appreciate the mental exercise involved in a good piece of reverse-engineering, this whole "independent iPhone/touch SDK" project strikes me as pretty much moot since the official SDK will come out in the next few weeks.
---- If iTunes' private keys could be found, third-party apps and hardware could quickly replace Apple sales,
What the heck are you talking about? To the extent that Apple does use encryption to move data from one device to another (and I don't happen to know of such a thing), the keys would have to be there in the hardware and extracting them would be feasible, if not trivial. If there was a key exchange protocol, that could be reverse-engineered and duplicated. Keeping a cryptosystem secure involves keeping either the either the key or the algorithm secret. But any device capable of decrypting anything has to have both the key and the algorithm, or it won't work. That's the fundamental lesson about cryptography that the RIAA and MPAA have spent ten years and tens of millions of dollars failing to learn.
Apple doesn't compete on lock-in. It competes on seamless user experience. Lots of people have voted with their dollars to say that they like having a product whose hardware, firmware, sync utilities, and network services were all designed by the same company, and actually work together. They like the idea of knowing who to blame if one of those pieces goes wrong, as opposed to the "it wasn't me, it was him" finger-pointing game you get from products that nominally adhere to some published standard.
Besides, knock-on products like AirTunes and the Apple TV generate only a fraction of revenue for Apple compared to the iPod -- which was just reported yesterday at $181 per unit for 22 million units and change shipped last quarter.
---- Apple could provide a Framework for iPod interaction, but it doesn't - that's not open to third parties. This closes out reasonable competition for the sake of their music store. . . .
The fact that Apple doesn't devote resources to publishing and maintaining an SDK hasn't stopped the groups above from putting out products that manage an iPod without a user even needing to install iTunes. The fact that you apparently didn't know they existed says something about the overwhelming demand for such products in the general market.
If Apple truly wanted to lock out such products, it would be easy for them to run the syncing process through a home-grown encryption tool for which they hold a patent. That would make any other product that worked an automatic infringement of the patent, and any attempt to circumvent the encryption a violation of the DMCA.
As for limiting DTrace, I think it's most likely that Apple's decision is based on its contractual agreements with the movie studios who just signed up to provide rentals. Those are the guys who demand that HD content remain in encrypted and unobservable channels from disc to screen. Granted the rental files aren't HD, but they are exploding media, to keep the Apple offerings more or less channel-neutral with pay-per-view cable, and I don't think the MPAA would be happy about a tool that allows people to snoop the video channel as it passes through iTunes.
---- They're probably not going to get into a DOJ tiff over it, though . . .
*sigh*
There are plenty of alternative sources for digital music, almost all of which will play on an iPod and be indexed by iTunes. The ones that don't are formats the market isn't beating down Apple's door to support (Ogg), or which require licensing fees (WMA). All the MP3s you've bought from Amazon play on an iPod. All the tracks you import from a CD will play on an iPod. The iTunes store is a convenience for iPod owners, not a necessity.
Besides, the standard operational definition of a monopoly is that a company can raise prices without losing sales, because consumers don't have credible alternatives. So far, Apple's behavior with regard to pricing is to fight against price increases.
There are credible alternatives to the iPod for people who want a digital music player. There are credible alternatives to the iTunes store for people who want to buy digital music. There are credible ways to get music without a digital music player. Apple has the leading products in the digital music player market, and is one of the leading outlets for digital music, but there is a big-ass difference between being a market leader and being a monopolist engaging in anticompetitive behavior, and the DOJ's attitude toward market leaders in competitive markets is "don't bother me, I have real work to do."
I've heard London described as a city where the average speed of transportation hasn't changed much in the past 500 years.
Most likely, Apple's intent is to deliver a 'credible effort' to prevent circumvention and/or reverse engineering.
Even though the labels have largely dropped DRM, they still don't like the idea of users having control over digital music. It's part of their DNA. Their whole business revolved around having control over the production and distribution systems, and they just can't contemplate existence without having control over something. The contracts between Apple and the labels reflect that fear, with Apple having the job of making it look like the horses are still in the barn even though the door is open.
Now technically, that's impossible. But my experience with corporate software development has shown me that you can balance 'customers who don't want to know what's impossible' with judicious use of handwavium. You don't have to build a solution that's bulletproof, you just need something that works most of the time. It doesn't matter if there are workarounds, or even if those workarounds are practically trivial for anyone with a technical background, as long as you can't discuss the workaround without using technical terms.
It's sort of an extension of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It's not that your customers can't think about the problem if you lack the vocabulary, it's more that they won't want to think about the problem if they have to spend effort learning how to discuss it intelligently.
So from a contractual standpoint, providing a 'credible effort' is more about obfuscation than actually trying to do the impossible. Apple probably doesn't care if people can work around this issue, as long as the explanation boils down to 'blah blah blah' to aggressively uninformed label executives.
No. That one's been tried before. This is a different flavor of stupid.
This one is about Apple 'actively disabling' WMA on the iPod in order to (illegally) bolster Apple's own AAC format.
Trouble is, the whole argument is bullshit. First of all, WMA is a proprietary format, not an open one, so there's a question about whether could even use WMA without paying Microsoft royalties. Then there's the fact that commercially-sold music comes with a DRM wrapper around whatever audio format actually encodes the music. And we know for damnsure that Microsoft licenses its DRM.
So the only 'competitors' being hurt under the terms defined in this lawsuit are outfits that sell non-DRM'd WMA, assuming that Apple could play non-DRM'd WMA without having to license those audio codecs from Microsoft. And AFAIK, there isn't much action in that part of the market.
And even if there were companies out there selling non-DRM'd WMA, the plaintiff would have to show some compelling reason why they couldn't also sell non-DRM'd AAC (which does play on the iPod) or plain MP3s (which also play on the iPod) if selling iPod-compatible music is so important to them.
A minor quibble: I don't know the exact chronology, but I've bought any number of Plus tracks from the iTunes store, and it seems to me that the price went down to $0.99/track before Amazon's digital music outlet became big news.
You're mistaking Apple's FairPlay DRM for the AAC format.
AAC is an open standard and most digital music players on the market today support it. As long as you have non-FairPlay AAC tracks, you should be able to use them on almost any player.
And by a strange coincidence, you can buy non-FairPlay AAC tracks from the iTunes store (at a higher bitrate than the DRM'd ones) for exactly the same price as the DRM'd ones. At least, you can as long as the label that owns the tracks has agreed to let Apple sell the tracks without DRM.
Even if you do have a library of FairPlay tracks, you have multiple options for converting them. The easiest is to burn the music to CD and then re-import it, but some people don't like that because the decode-and-reencode shuffle reduces the quality of the music. So there are free programs out there that will strip the DRM off any track as long as you have a legitimate key. Those produce non-DRM'd AAC tracks with no loss of sound quality.
Apple isn't the company demanding DRM on every track.
And getting back to the point of the original article, correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't Apple have to pay licensing fees to play tracks that use Microsoft's DRM? I mean, plain non-DRM WMA is all well and good, but how much non-DRM WMA is out there commercially? This is an antitrust lawsuit after all, so 'tracks I ripped from CDs I already own' don't count. There's no commercial interest competing with the iTunes store, there.
Only sales outlets that supply non-DRM WMA would have standing to sue, and even then, they'd have to show a compelling reason why they only sell non-DRM WMA and not non-DRM AAC.
For that matter, since I'm not an audio-format-licensing geek, can Apple even use non-DRM WMA without paying a licensing fee to Microsoft? Sure the chip has the capacity to decode WMA, but that doesn't automatically mean Apple can use the capacity without paying for it.
The Osborne Effect: what happens when consumers are so 'well informed' about upcoming products that it puts the company out of business.
Let's also consider Microsoft's long-standing "Real Soon Now" policy for killing competing products. 'Inform the consumers' that MS will release something "just as good" in the near future, and that it's silly to go with another vendor when all your business software is currently from MS, and you can pretty much wipe out a company with a good product.
Beyond that, consumer markets have this thing called 'first mover advantage'. There's some serious dollar value to opening up a new market so fast that the competition has to run like hell just to get a shoe in the door. Leak the specs for an upcoming project far enough in advance, and any company in an even vaguely similar line of business can have a me-too product ready to go on the shelves about the same time as your debut. The end result is that nobody makes enough money to make the new market seem worthwhile, and the whole thing lapses back into nothingness in about six months.
There are lots of cases where a large number of people who make 'well informed' decisions in their best interest end up making things worse for themselves and everyone else. See: The Tragedy of the Commons.
Besides, the whole idea of 'informed, rational consumers' is pretty much fantasy anyway. If such creatures existed, most people wouldn't have some gadget in their kitchen that they haven't used even once since they bought it. We also wouldn't see billions of dollars every year rewarding the software industry's de facto policy of 'whoever has the longest list of bullet points wins'.
The line you cite isn't from the APA itself. It's from Schedule 1.1(a) - Assets. Section 1.1 of the APA reads:
Note that last line:
The plain language of the contract says that Schedule 1.1(a) doesn't tell the whole story. It must be limited by the assets excluded in Schedule 1.1(b). And if we look at Schedule 1.1(b), we see the following:
In short, SCO 'owned' the source code of UNIX and UnixWare the way you or I 'own' a book. The physical block of paper and ink is ours to do with as we please, but buying a copy of the latest Harry Potter book doesn't give me the right to start licensing Harry Potter merchandise.
Oh God.. not another case of 'Apple has a monopoly on Macs'-itis.
Yes, Apple has a monopoly on Macs: it's called a trademark. Dell has a monopoly on Dells; the Coca Cola Corporation has a monopoly on Coke.
A trademark is a federally created and enforced monopoly that allows consumers to associate specific products with specific vendors. It exists to define competition between different vendors in the same market. It has nothing to do with a single company locking in so much of a given market that it can dictate terms to consumers, or engaging in anticompetitive behavior to keep other vendors from getting enough market share to make price- and feature-competition relevant again.
Sure: It's like saying a car that's out of gas is 'totaled'.
You don't define a market in terms of a single company's product. You define a market in terms of all products that fill the same general consumer need. BMW is part of the automobile market. Coke is part of the soft drink market. Oreos are part of the snack foods market. Rolexes are part of the timepiece market. Zunes are part of the protable music player market.
Macs are part of the personal computer market, competing with Windows machines and desktop Linux.
Apple found out that it didn't like 'allied' companies cherry-picking customers from the highest-margin segment of its market, using machines that were only nominally compliant with Apple's specs. I know that from firsthand experience, having done tech support for some of those machines back in the day.
The cloning experiment proved quite clearly that licensing the OS to other companies did absolutely nothing to increase Apple's slice of the market. All it did was force Apple to compete with its own 'partners' for the most profitable chunk of the same slice.
---- The 'product' here is aggregated stuff that flows in _after_ it has been placed online elsewhere
No, the 'product' is the service of aggregating all that content in one place, so you don't have to trawl all over the net looking for new places to get your snark on.
Aggregation doesn't just happen. It takes back-end tools to select, organize, and present all that 'stuff that flows in'. The Slashdot team wrote the software, built the database, and maintains the network that keeps it all going. They also have a ten-year track record of selecting and aggregating stuff that geeks find reasonably interesting. If you think that's trivial or easy, go right ahead and start your own aggregation service. We'll see where you stand ten years from now.
The number of attack vectors for Windows counters that argument.
As the anecdotal reports here on Slashdot demonstrate, not every Windows box is vulnerable to a given worm/trojan/virus/etc. Some pieces of malware target older versions of the OS. Some attack specific services. Some go after specific applications. Some get caught due to the widespread use of anti-malware in the Windows environment.
Each exploitable segment is only a fraction of the total Windows installed base, and some of those segments are probably smaller than the Mac installed base. And yet those holes get exploited, even with all the awareness of malware that Windows users have acquired over the years. If Mac users are truly that much more vulnerable simply because of "it hasn't happened yet so it never will" reasoning, one would expect a Mac exploit to hit roughly the same number of machines as a specific Windows exploit. It would be hard to argue that the number of exposed Macs would be at least an order of magnitude smaller than any currently-exploited Windows vulnerability.
And besides, like I said, botnet managers don't care about the efficiency of a given exploit. They're all about spray-and-pray. Given the resources we know to be out there right now, DDOSing security researchers, and the historical pattern of viruses that hit hard and fast, there's nothing to prevent an attack from hitting enough Macs to be noteworthy within only a few hours.
And once again, given all the "calls to arms" that paint Mac users as smug and unaware of the danger -- if not actively in denial that any danger exists -- you'd expect a longer grace period for a Mac attack simply because it would take longer for the Mac community to acknowledge the risk and develop an effective response. We don't have nearly as much experience with malware detection and recovery as Windows users do.
---- as someone above already pointed out, if you have a group of people whose operating system was designed to be "user friendly" (i.e. generally made for less technically inclined folk) they are less likely to pay attention to the possibility of an infection.
You haven't used OS X much, have you?
There's a difference between what you refer to as 'user friendly' and what Larry Wall calls a 'well Huffman-coded system'. I.e.: it makes common and safe things easy, while making the rare and risky things more difficult. Want to save a copy of an image you saw on a webpage? Just click on it and drag the semitransparent proxy to the desktop. The OS handles the logic necessary to create a file of the appropriate type with an appropriate name. Simple.
Want to download a piece of software from the internet? That takes more steps. First you have to download and open the disk image. Now, I agree with pretty much everyone with a mind to security that the 'Open "safe" files after downloading' option in Safari should be eliminated, or turned off as the factory default at the very least, but even if you do let the thing open automatically, the OS identifies it as code which has never run on the system. It pops up a dialog explaining that you've never run this piece of software before, tells you where it came from, and asks for confirmation. If it tries to install anything outside the user's home directory, you get another dialog that asks for an administrator password.
That's a lot more complicated than most interaction people have with OS X. The design team made the good decision to keep challenges for the admin password rare, and to restrict them to "you do know you're tinkering with the guts of this machine, yes?" events, so the system doesn't encourage users to get into a habit of blindly punching in the admin password and clicking 'Okay'.
Now, the trojan under discussion admits to being an installer, it just lies about what's being installed. If more third-party developers embraced the "To install, drag the icon from this disk to your desktop" model of installation, instead of clinging to the idea that they have to spray files to hell and gone throughout the file tree, even that vector for social engineering would be harder to exploit.
---- A Mac virus won't spread via the 'net because the odds of a random connection leading to another Mac is much smaller than hitting a PC.
Would people please get over the idea that you need an infected Mac to infect another Mac?
An exploit is a package of bytes. Period. You can send that packet of bytes from any machine running any OS, to any machine running any OS. My NetBSD servers get any number of probes that could compromise a suitably-(mis)configured Windows box. Botnet managers don't lovingly hand-craft their networks. They send out a huge number of attacks to potential targets, and collect the ones that succeed. If 99.9% of those attacks fail, who cares? It's not like they're paying for the bandwidth, hardware, or electricity.
If there was a vulnerability in the Mac OS that could turn the machine into another component of a botnet without requiring user interaction, the people creating botnets would be on it like buzzards on a shit-wagon. There is absolutely no technical limitation which would prevent the Storm Worm botnet from launching an attack against Macs if the chance of getting any returns at all made it worth the effort. So far, the security practices OS X has inherited from its Unix predecessors -- which grew up in an untrusted network environment -- have kept that from happening. The whole dick-measuring thing of comparing installed bases is utterly irrelevant.
---- I doubt you will find an article about a webcomic in a newspaper unless it is notable.
This raises what I consider to be a fundamental question about Wikipedia's notability standards, though.
Howard Tayler cites 293,781 referrals to his site for the month of September. And that's just referrals, not unique page hits. There are magazines and newspapers that don't have that kind of circulation. By what standard do the Wikipedia admins decide something of interest to more than a quarter million people per month is 'not noteworthy', while Wikipedia boasts unique pages for minor characters from video games?
From my reading in the threads of discussion about this issue (including the proposed deletion of Brian McNeil's Wikinews page covering the subject -- an exercise in irony if I ever saw one), it seems to me that Wikipedia's admins still have their heads set in the notability standards of pre-internet institutions. An issue cited in print is notable. A blog post (or a webcomic with north of a quarter million referrals per month) might be axed simply for not having that 'old media cachet'.
The mechanism of information distribution is changing, guys. News is becoming decentralized. The major news organs no longer set the baseline for breaking news or depth of coverage. They're the places that do a 30-second distillation of something that's been hot online for the past week.
IMnHO, the notion of deleting pages for their adherence to a half-unwritten set of 'notability' standards seems like a lousy way to decide what to keep. By definition, it puts the decision of what shall be seen in the hands of a select few, and grossly inflates those people's opinion of what's 'noteworthy'. It's a textbook case of selection bias.. users don't get to see pages the admins deem 'not noteworthy', so there's no evidence to challenge Administrative Wisdom. On one hand, you have a general demand for information in the public which we can call 'what people want to know'. On the other hand, you have a Wikipedia admin's mental model of 'what people want to know'. You'd have to come up with one hell of an argument to convince me that the correlation between those two is significant enough to justify appointing those people as the gatekeepers of what people are allowed to see.. especially when it comes to edge cases like subjects which appeal to a select population.
If you want to apply 'the wisdom of crowds' to the question of what's worth keeping in Wikipedia, take new pages from anyone who wants to add them, then do a cull based on usage on every anniversary of the page's most recent edit. Pages that receive no traffic for a year get deleted. That's how libraries cull their collections, BTW, except they generally use a 'no checkouts in the last ten years' standard.
In other words, let the community decide what the community wants to see, and what the community considers to have lasting value.
---- I can just say "surprise me" and receive an essentially endless flow of music that I happen to like because I put it there.
My first point is that there's a certain amount of effort on your part just "putting it there," and that assembling a truly large library involves a lot of work. My second point is that the more stuff you put there, the less likely it is that you'll hear any given song. Try buying a new album and loading it onto your MP3 player, then listening to a random selection of songs for a month. What are the odds that you'll have heard every song on that new album?
---- What they can do about that I don't really know.
Well, the thing that seems to be working best right now is to get rid of the middleman. A lot of artists sell their stuff directly, skipping that whole "label keeps all but $0.12 per song" business. I can see a day coming when labels don't actually take possession of the music they distribute, and don't have exclusive rights to the stuff they sell.
Another model that makes sense to me would be for artists to fund their next album on preorders instead of advance money from the labels. The artists put their pitch materials on a website -- lyrics, demo tracks, what have you -- then set a series of financial milestones that will trigger further development: at $500, we post all the lyrics for all the songs that we'll produce; at $1500, we'll post melody tracks; at $3000, we'll post rehearsal tracks; at $6000 we ship. Pay as much as you want up front, and you can keep adding to your contribution as you go. Anyone who pays $1 or more gets to download a copy before we release the discs for general sale. Anyone who pays more than $5 gets the download and a pre-release copy of the disc. Anyone who pays more than $25 gets the extra-special not-released-for-general-sale art and the disc will be signed by everyone involved. Anyone who pays more than $50 gets the download, the pre-release disc, the art, and as much other merch as we can shove in the box. Etcetera.
Neither of those is particularly good for the labels, but it seems to me they could combine the subscription service with a direct purchase plan. Sign up for the subscription and explore the library, and build the music equivalent of a Netflix waiting list. After three months, we'll start giving you downloadable copies of the stuff in that list.. say five songs a month on a $10 subscription.
That seems to me to be the best compromise between subscription and outright purchase. It gives users freedom to explore new stuff at very little cost, and also gives them a way to build their own library of stuff they want to hear over and over again.