An all things Apple thread

[Shadowself]

Originally Posted by Zvi

How about this: "In fact, other than Apple's iTunes, no other online music vendor has such a restriction in place; yet these other online vendors still manage to provide copyright protection mechanisms to artists and record labels -- often the same artists and labels whose same songs are sold online through iTunes." That is about their DRM and Apple preventing anyone else to play iTunes files on other portable players and other software playing music on iPod, Apple refusing to license Fairplay DRM and so on.
You can look at that as business acumen, but IMHO that's monopolist, anticompetitive and all that.

You state, “In fact, other than Apple's iTunes, no other online music vendor has such a restriction in place...” which is, in fact, untrue. Microsoft has a similar restriction. The DRM laden music put forth under the “Plays for Sure” banner plays on any OS as long as it is a Microsoft OS. How is that different from Apple’s DRM laden music from iTunes playing on any MP3 player as long as it’s an iPod? As I understand it, the Zune is even more restrictive. Buy music from Microsoft’s store that is targeted for the Zune and it only plays on the Zune. So it is restricted to both Microsoft’s OS and Microsoft’s Zune.

What Apple is doing with DRM is not to be praised in any shape or form, but it is not unusual in the industry, and it most certainly is no more illegally monopolistic than what Microsoft is doing with it’s Zune ecosystem.

Apple came late to the MP3 player market and worked a deal with the music industry over DRM and such. Apple’s market share has grown tremendously since that late start. Apple has done nothing with it’s software and hardware to make it less interoperable with the overall community than it was on day one. In fact, it has made it even more usable by the community as it is the only major hardware/software pair that works with both Windows and Macs after it ADDED Windows support several months after its initial efforts (which were Mac only). Adding usability to almost 90% of the installed personal computer base is not what anyone I know would call anti competitive.

You continue with, “That is about their DRM and Apple preventing anyone else to play iTunes files on other portable players and other software playing music on iPod...”. I’m not quite sure what you’re saying here, but you can play iTunes obtained music on other players – sure it’s not a lossless conversion (but then the AAC bit rate Apple uses is not lossless to start with), but it can easily be done. And you can play any music on the iPod as long as it does not have a competitor’s DRM on it. Is Apple to be faulted because Microsoft has not licensed it’s DRM to Apple? Is Apple to be faulted because Real has not licensed its DRM to Apple?

In fact, Real has created software that lets iTunes purchased songs on players supported by Real and on Real players under Windows. Has Apple sued Real for creating this software? No. (One Apple exec did call them “pirates” though.) What Apple officially has said is that it won’t actively support Real’s “transcoding” software. Thus when Apple upgrades iTunes and the iPod firmware sometimes it breaks Real’s software and sometimes it does not. But the bottom line here is that Apple has never attempted to stop Real from creating the software.

Additionally, IIRC, “DVD Jon” (I don’t’ recall his real name at the moment) has written software that breaks Apple’s DRM. Has Apple gone after him about this? No. Do they like it? No. But between Real and “DVD Jon” you have options other than the iPod.