misplaced blame

I guess we should all have waited for the music industry to present a digital music store: I’m sure it would have been more sensitive to consumer rights than big bad Apple and their eveil DRM.

Anti-iTunes DRM demonstrations across the USA tomorrow:

Tomorrow, activists in seven cities across the US will picket Apple Stores, handing out information about the dangers of the DRM hidden in Apple’s iTunes. iTunes DRM may seem pretty innocuous at first, but every time you invest in an iTunes Store song, you make it more expensive to switch to an Apple competitor’s product at any time in the future. You didn’t have to abandon your CDs to switch to MP3s (in fact, the more CDs you owned, the better your MP3 experience was, since you could rip those CDs to seed your MP3 collection), but if you want to go from Apple’s iTunes to a competing device, ever, you have to be prepared to abandon your whole investment.

Unless you burn your tracks to CD, something Apple recommends anyway (hint, hint). DRM only exists within the iTunes/iPod part of your music collection. Once it gets burned to physical media, the tracks are free of DRM.

Also this:

I love this FUD, if the music industry had not forced DRM on Apple, Apple wouldn’t be the focus. If Apple’s iTunes under new attacks in Europe Why isn’t Microsoft’s DRM mantioned? Why isn’t the music industry mentioned as the culprit in these articles?

I guess some would be happy without Apple creating a mainstream market for digital music. I don’t think they are altruistic here and I don’t impute any kind of holiness to their motives, but seriously, do the DRM==Death forces think that the power of iPod/iTunes as a way of getting this into the mainstream is helping or not?

And Gary weighs in with his 2 hundreds of a Euro:

Back to the Dark Ages:

Now ask yourself one question:

“Before iTunes how did you get your music online?”
I would guess the vast majority of you would have got it via P2P. Because before iTunes what was there? Steve Jobs went to the labels and made them a proposition. If you think that he would have ever got them to sign on the dotted line without DRM in place then you really need to get out more. He’s good but not that good. I’d say the deal struck was built on a very, very fine razors edge. Probably only possible because the recording industry never thought it would work. The recording industry had the minimum of DRM in place and Apple were making next to nothing (if anything) from the service. With Apple it was the iPod link-up that was key to them. There’s already been news coverage regarding the industry wanting a cut of iPod revenue and the talk about increases in the cost per track, which Steve Jobs stood firm against. I’d link but I’m writing this offline. I’m in no doubt that if Apple removed or lessened the DRM within iTunes in any way then the record industry would pull their support for the service.

Why should they anyway. They are a business and they have a successful … very successful service. Why shouldn’t they protect it? If people didn’t want it they wouldn’t use it.

So when I read a story like that on Boing Boing maybe you can see why I shake my head in despair? If you can’t then understanding that you don’t have to use iTunes might seal the deal for you. Go into a store and buy a CD and rip it. Apple DRM is integral to a service which nobody has to use. [emphasis added]

So let’s all start a witch hunt against Apple because all DRM is evil after all and the music industry would do a much better job at providing a download service free of DRM … er … perhaps not. So mebbe the DRM activists have the solution to provide affordable music easily online? Oh wait they have to have the agreement of the music industry for that … and they’d want DRM.

Bringing up a problem without a solution — and “stick it to the Man with p2p” is not a solution — is a waste of time.

Apparently, there is one of these flash mobs today at my local Apple Store: if I cared enough I could counterprotest and urge the disgruntled to drop their iPods off at the store and replace them with something else. Radio Shack and Sony both have stores there and I’m sure Sony offers a competitive product and service.

So let’s review:
iTunes is an application that allows you to organize and play back your music collection, no matter how it was obtained. It also allows you to license tracks for playback on up to 5 systems as well as burning them to CD.
The iPod is a music player that works with iTunes as it’s organizational/collection management component. It will play any music you put on it, no matter how it was obtained.

Could it have been worse? Imagine the RIAA cartel members requiring you to key in some detail from the packaging before you could play a track. Yeah, it could have been a lot worse. As DRM schemes go, Apple’s compromise is pretty permissive. You can in fact scrub the DRM from your iTunes-purchased tracks by burning them to CD and re-ripping them.

Eejits, as the man said.