HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Here's an article on Apple in Newsweek:

Newsweek 26 February 2007

"Freedom Song"

One of the breakthroughs of Apple's iTunes music store is its relative lack of restrictions. The store's digital-rights-management(DRM)sofware, folded into each music file, protects against piracy but allows users some leeway in making copies for their own use. One aspect of Apple's system has continued to rankle, however. Its DRM program, called Fairplay, doesn't play with others. A song from the iTunes store only plays on iTunes, and songs from competitors like Napster or Rhapsody won't play on your iPod. This is a classic "lock-in" that binds a customer to the products of one company, with no benefit in return.

For years, Job's public stance was that customers were happy with the situation. But now Apple's lack of interoperability is becoming a problem. The record labels are grousing about Apple's power in the industry. More pressing is a series of legislative and regulatory challenges from Europe, specifically in France and Norway, which threaten to mandate iTunes interoperability. Job's response was a sort of blog posting from atop Olympus - an essay, posted recently on Apple's Web site, called "Thoughts on Music".

The essay explains why it is infeasible to do what his critics are asking - to fix iTunes so that when you buy something from his store it will play on other systems, and vice versa. The reason, he says, is that "a DRM system employs secrets." By refusing to share Fairplay with others, Apple can protect those secrets. If hackers manage to unlock the secrets, then Apple can fix the broken lock in the next version of iTunes. By sharing its secrets, he claims, they'd be more easily discovered. By contrast, dropping DRM altogether would open up a musical paradise in which songs would be "playable on all players" and trigger an explosion of start-ups eager to exploit the new freedom.

The idea may work in the long run. But for now, many people in the record industry see DRM as the future, and you'd have to pry it from their cold dead hands before they'd release their digital tunes without it. And some of them see Jobs as a parasite getting fat by selling iPods while the music industry itself is mired in hard times. Significantly, the Recording Industry Association of America has ignored Jobs's call to drop DRM. Instead it congratulated him for offering to license Fairplay to other technology companies - an offer issued nowhere in Jobs's statement. Who needs the Grammys when we've got a catfight like this?

â€šStart of Something NeW 3:15:00 PM COMMENTS