If Apple stopped producing new versions, I suppose eventually PC technology would move on to the point that the last version of iTunes would no longer run on modern equipment. I suppose you’d have to also assume a large lack of backwards compatibility and a scarcity of old hardware. Of course, by the time that happened, digital music encryption and bit rates, or whatever it’s called, will probably have moved so far along that what you buy now from the iTunes store will be the old hat equivalent of a 45 rpm record, and everyone will have moved on to something better.
Like I alluded to above, for your old Apple files to become useless, you’d also have to imagine a situation where Apple no longer supported their own stuff, but they would still fight to protect their propriety formats to stop anyone else from reverse engineering them to make them work. I don’t think that’s very likely. Maybe if a meteorite squashed all of Cupertino, with the exception of the legal department?
Um, Windows 7? Software support and upgrades are necessary to keep itunes working over the years. If Apple disappeared, eventually their software will stop working or become obsolete.
The DMCA? I was under the impression that it is illegal to strip DRM from copyrighted works. Apple’s DRM is secret. If the Linux community can’t hack it now, I would guess that nobody can.
And what’s the incentive for Apple to divest that information as they’re going out of business or disappearing or whatever? The goodness of their heart?
I’m not saying it’s likely, or that it isn’t easy to get around. All you have to do is burn all your m4a songs to a CD and load them back into your computer as mp3s. I agree that if “Apple vanished today, all your music would STILL play”, I just disagree that it “would continue to do so”, especially if you’re like most computer users and don’t know a mp3 from a dll. Without a little extra work, over time that music will eventually stop playing and the music you paid for will be lost.
Right. Also, does the iTunes EULA allow it to run on other versions of Windows? Does it allow you to move a copy from one version to another? Don’t take any of these things for granted.
Bingo. The DMCA gives even the weakest DRM the force of Federal law in America (Coming soon, other countries). It doesn’t matter if you just lost money because Apple’s money matters more.
I don’t think this matters as per the DMCA, but it happens to be.
Nobody can because it’s illegal. Every DRM scheme so far has proven laughably weak to people outside the reach of the DMCA (who are still threatened by morons who think their law reaches around the world).
Exactly true. Wal-Mart had no such morality.
It is illegal. You can go to prison or at least lose most of your money.
Right. It’s only the honest (and, usually, the ignorant) people who suffer.
The DMCA bars unauthorized circumvention. What would be the point of Apple’s maintaining its anti-circumvention rights if it is no longer exploiting its technology?
Furthermore, in order to enforce the anti-circumvention provisions, someone has to sue. How is an out-of-existence Apple going to do that?
It seems to me the way they do it is by offering their customers a pretty good user experience from the get-go.
That’s sort of the direction I was leaning. Yes, it’s almost certainly illegal to circumvent or reverse engineer Apple’s proprietary format software. That protection under law could expire after a period of time, or it could be perpetual. It doesn’t matter either way for the sake of this argument.
The question I have is, does the legal impediment to messing with Apple’s intellectual property rely on Apple actively dragging any offenders to court or is it something that, I dunno, some government department, somewhere, will prosecute on it’s own? Because if it’s the former, and Apple did in fact “disappear” as was the premise, who’s going to enforce the law? If no one, what’s the problem?
Look at the Psystar example. A company started up selling Mac clones, which these days is pretty much just a PC running a ported version of OS X. They were able to start up their business and sell the things, and no law enforcement agency kicked their door in and told them to stop. Eventually Apple filed suit, Psystar sued them right back, and the legal catfight is ongoing. The web site is still up and it looks like you can still purchase one of these off brand Macs, if you so choose (although testing has suggested that you get what you pay for with these devices). If Apple hadn’t acted, because they’d vanished somehow, Psystar could turn out their cheap Mac boxes until the cows came home.
There are criminal penalties in the DMCA (in addition to civil action) for circumvention-- any criminal action must be prosecuted by a U.S. attorney. However, the criminal penalties are only for willful circumvention for financial gain or commercial advantage. As a practical matter, if Apple doesn’t exist to exert its rights, and, furthermore, if the only circumvention being done is so that users can continue to use hardware and software are no longer being supported, then the Department of Justice is not likely to bring a criminal complaint.
I don’t know what the basis is for Apple’s action in the Psystar case, so I can’t speak to that issue.
IIRC, its EULA violations that they’re going after Psystar. If Apple’s league of [del]sharks[/del] lawyers somehow manages to blow the case (it can happen), it could put the whole concept of EULA’s in doubt (which would be a good thing, IMHO).
More like the labels decided to give Apple and Jobs a hearty “fuck you” in the form of giving DRM-free music rights to Amazon and pointedly not revising their agreements with regard to iTunes. EMI was the only label that took Jobs up on his offer to drop DRM right away, so the first iTunes Plus files were all from them. Their sales figures went up after that happened, by the way. It looks like the other labels are snubbing Apple in order to preferentially support Amazon’s nascent online music store at the expense of possibly higher revenues from selling DRM-free files through iTunes.
Same thing as NBC getting pissy with Jobs saying that there was going to be one price for TV shows, no tiered pricing, take it or leave it. Result: NBC didn’t sell anything on iTunes for about a year, lost out on millions of dollars in revenues during that time, and eventually reentered the store with the same exact pricing deal that everyone else has.
They still offer TV shows through Unboxed too. I’m not aware that Apple ever even attempted to get an exclusive deal with NBC or anyone, they just didn’t bow to pressure about their marketing and pricing. NBC probably could have protested the pricing, kept their show on iTunes while they tried out Unboxed, and had the best of both worlds by earning money from both outlets. This way, the only thing NBC really gained was some negative publicity.
I’m not saying that Apple is saintly and that Jobs is the archangel in charge (the recent bullshit with the non-disclosure agreement in regards to iPhone development is a case in point, as are the ongoing shenanigans with the App Store) but you’ve got to be engaging in some spin to say that he’s full of shit about his stance on DRM. Most of the evidence points to sincerity, whether it was through enlightened self-interest (which has my vote, for the record) or the moral high ground.
Only if you look at music and ignore movies. As I mentioned above, if Jobs really believed in the stuff he says about DRM, we’d see DRM-free movies from Disney on the Apple store. He absolutely has the power to make that happen, and hasn’t done so.
First, his open letter was titled, “Thoughts on Music”, not “Thoughts on the Whole Concept of Encrypted Media Files.”
Second, the revenue streams for music and movies are completely different. Musicians make more money from live performances, always have. The media companies were the only ones who were making much money off the sales of recordings; the bands usually got screwed, sometimes to the point of losing money on media sales.
Theater screenings usually lose money for studios. They spend more to advertise a movie in most cases than they make off the ticket sales. Media sales are extremely important and have been since studios finally realized that unless they embraced video rentals and sales they were missing out on a huge amount of money that would keep them from spiraling down the toilet if they continued to depend only on theater sales. TV rights are probably the other big source of profits, and you know how complicated that end is getting with the advent of DVRs and everyone being resistant to viewing advertising.
It would be stupid in the extreme not to have some kind of copy restrictions on video files since that’s one of the biggest sources of revenue. Unlike with music, the people making movies do not make any money off the equivalent of live performances. Their only sources of revenue depend on getting paid for sales of the final product.
I’ve got no philosophical or moral argument against copy protections. My only gripes are about bad implementations and ridiculous restrictions. The way to make copy restrictions work is to make them loose enough and transparent enough that most people won’t even care about them…unless the goal is to make a bunch of copies for sale.
Here is where you’ve got a bit of an argument. To make downloadable rentals work at all, some kind of DRM has to be employed to enforce the time limit, but the restrictions on movie rentals aren’t as generous as a physical rental from a store. You’ve only got 24 hours from when you first view a rental from the iTunes store to finish watching it. That might change to be less restrictive in the future if rental income isn’t as good as Jobs thinks it should be.
Like I said before, Apple is a company. They’re in business to make money. Jobs is a businessman. He didn’t make his billions by being stupid. Part of not being stupid is balancing the wants of customers with the needs of the company. There was no anarchist posturing with Jobs saying things like, “Information wants to be free!” in his statement. He was talking about the realities of the market and the stupidity of trying to maintain an untenable position. If selling DRM-locked music made more money and made people more willing to buy, he probably would have supported it. He wanted to drop the DRM simply because it was a PR and logistical nightmare, and was pointless from a money-making point of view. The same thing will probably not work for movies just because the markets are so different.
