Bad Apple
I recall Wes having a bit of a rant about iTunes DRM a while back. Well, I've got my own now... but as a picture == 1000 words:
So, there's 2000 words.... For those of you watching in Black and White, the first picture is of iTunes saying "You need to upgrade to iTunes 7 before I can sell you this music" and the second is of the iTunes download pages saying "Nope... can't find iTunes 7 for you to download mate..."
Of course, as far as I can see - for the UK music buyer - there doesn't currently seem to be any credible online alternative to iTunes. All the other sites either have vastly reduced catalogues of 'new music', require a subscription (OD2/MSN/Oxfam/Tiscali/CD-WOW/eMusic/Napster), infect your system heavily with Windows DRM (WMA format - Woolworths/HMV/Virgin Digital) or are blatently illegal! (allofmp3.com).
Certainly, I understand that the reasons why iTunes has to be continually updated to discourage the friendly hackers is probably due to RIAA pressure to protect their 'bottom-line'. But - as Wes says - I am somewhat surprised that we havn't yet seen a truely open-source alternative.
Something - perhaps - like Sun's DReaM proposals. But unfortunately that's unlikely to ever be implemented in practice though, due to opposition from the 'Free Software' (as in speech) wing of the OS movement....
But anyway, something has to change eventually - you can't continue to have the situation where a music item from one shop is incompatible with an item bought from another shop. That's simply anti-competative behaviour and - taken to it's extremes - will discourage both musicians (who can't sell their work) and listeners (who can't hear the work)...
posted by RichB @ Wednesday, September 27, 2006
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