iTunes in the Cloud and Why This Scares Me
Apple’s recent media event solidified what we all knew was coming: Rentals and non-local storage is the future of our digital content. Ask any teenager if they’d rather watch TV or YouTube and they’ll answer Google’s on-demand free service full of people doing stuff on video is their preferred entertainment. Give that teen an iPhone or iPad and YouTube is where they’ll go first. It’s appealing to have content that’s not stored locally streamed instantly and Apple/Google aren’t the only companies leading this initiative.
Right now, most of the content you own is stored locally on our Macs or iOS devices. This content includes apps, books, videos, music and documents. The cutting edge techies have embraced Gmail, Google Docs and cloud services like DropBox and Box.net. The only thing keeping you from storing movies in the cloud and viewing those on your iPad is Internet speed. What if I told you the copy of Finding Nemo you bought from iTunes can be streamed instantly to any Apple device no matter where you were in the world — a café, driving down the interstate or in the London tube? It’s almost here.
Our future is wireless at speeds that meet what we have in our homes. This may be a decade away and if carriers make wireless data truly unlimited this will be a reality, but it scares me for a few very obvious reasons that simply can’t be fixed by technology.
Corporate Control of Our Data
Control by a single entity is my main fear. Cloud storage isn’t democratized and it isn’t open. Currently, when you buy something, it’s stored, owned and managed by the company you purchased it from. Apple has maintained DRM in its iTunes Store since 2003. I’ve authorized files that I bought the day Apple’s store opened and they still play on any one of my Apple devices. If I lose that song, Apple can allow me to re-download it after some back and forth with its support team. My apps, movies, music and music videos are locked to its devices. The same goes with Amazon’s Kindle platform. Buying a book from Amazon’s Kindle Store means that file is locked to its software and hardware. If it ever abandons Kindle, your books are useless. There’s no reason for either of these companies to do this, but people who bought music from stores that are now defunct are in a bit of a pickle with the content.
An example of a failed system is Microsoft’s PlaysForSure DRM. A number of music stores and MP3 players adopted this, but most of those stores and hardware companies have shifted directions or gone out of business. The hundreds you spent on music may be playable right now but no one can guarantee you’ll be able to in 10 years.
Let’s simply alter my argument a bit and change the delivery of this content from DRMed files stored on your hard drive to music stored on the cloud operated by Napster or Real’s Rhapsody Store. If those services go away, the music you “own” is no longer playable…ever. Going all in on a service that is cloud based is risky business. The same goes for content stored on Google Docs, Flickr, MobileMe and YouTube. If you’re not keeping hard copies of your content uploaded to these services, you’re a fool. Hard drives are cheap. Store your content and don’t rely on these web services that have been around for less than a few years to store your content forever. Personally, I use Backupify.com to keep secondary backups of all my data from Gmail, Google Docs, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and WordPress. I download copies from Backupify once a month to my hard drive.
Remember when Amazon ironically pulled copies of 1984 from Kindle devices without warning? Cloud based companies can do this. They might give you a warning but no one can come into your house and take a book. Unless what you’re storing is illegal or your hard drives are compromised, the data in your home and on your computer is safe for years as long as you’re careful. Keeping a backup of your computers on an external drive at home and a duplicate at your office is good enough and I suggest anyone do that no matter how insignificant the data is. If you store photos, music and documents on your computer, back it up off-site — no exceptions.
Apple is playing it safe with its new Apple TV. Allowing us to stream rented movies and TV shows is a good way to get us comfortable with streaming content. You can still buy the same content on your iOS and Mac devices and stream those to the Apple TV but, if you’re on a TV browsing iTunes, the only option is to rent the content.
It won’t be like this forever. Soon, streaming will be offered as a more convenient and less expensive option for us. Apple and other companies will present products where you can hit play on anything you’ve ever purchased and it starts instantly as long as you have an Internet connection from your phone, tablet and computer. Invite a friend to borrow your copy of Braveheart and they can watch it as well. This convenience will not be without problems.
In Apple We Trust
Apple is on top right now. Its mobile devices are envied by every CE company, but this won’t be the reality forever. I own 300 iOS apps, 1,200 movies, 200 music videos and over 18,000 songs where over 5,000 of those songs were purchased in iTunes. I’ve invested thousands of dollars in Apple. Thanks to limited kindness of the music industry, my music is now DRM free in iTunes Plus format so it can be played on any other MP3 player, but the other content is stuck. When Apple’s devices aren’t the best and someone else takes over, I’ll be stuck to the Apple ecosystem. The same can be said for Mac software when you make the switch to Windows 7 (for whatever reason) but it’s a reality we all need to deal with.
When you want to switch to a cooler and better mobile platform, will you be okay with giving up the thousands spent on DRMed content that can’t be played on the new device? If Apple remains the dominant leader for the next 20 years, can we trust it to be kind to its loyal fans who trust when we buy a movie stored exclusively on Apple’s cloud to always be playable and never be pulled, removed or changed? Will my copy of Braveheart always work no matter where I am or will I be greeted with an error when I’m in China with, “this movie is not licensed to be played in your region.” Where the hard copy stored on my iPad would play just fine no matter where I was? We’ll see. Apple is not a movie studio so its hands are tied when it comes to content and how that content plays just as much as any other company when it comes to music and movies.
The White Album Argument
Maybe I’m not seeing the big picture. There’s another side to this where if you ask anyone over the age of 50 how many times they’ve bought The Beatles’ White Album and they won’t be able to keep count. There was record, 8-track, tape, cassette and maybe even mini-disk. They probably also bought it in CD form the first, second and third time it was remastered. You may have bought this album eight times since it was first available in record stores.
Perhaps that’s how it’s going to be when it comes to our digital music. Perhaps, you’ll buy the same content over and over again well into your old age because there would have been a few music services between 2000 and 2050. On my 70th birthday, I may lament to my grandkids that I spent thousands on music in iTunes and they’ll laugh because music is like $20 a song now and I shouldn’t be complaining that it cost 99 cents back then.
Planning for the Future
Whatever happens next, consumers are in control. We decide with our cold hard cash. We already voted that digital is the future since iTunes sales will pass the sales of physical CDs very soon, but if we go all-in on cloud content trusting in the corporations storing and delivering it, the world may shift immensely and when you take a vacation to the mountains with your family where there’s limited cell reception, the music, movies and important work documents will all be inaccessible stored in some server that’s unreachable and you’ll have to laugh because this was the future we all wanted that corporations gave us.
Maybe I’m skeptical, but the best content is physical (bookshelf) with a digital version (non-DRM) and a backup of that digital copy off-site. If your house burns down, you’ll still have the book or CD digitally but the world we’re entering into is all digital with single corporations holding the DRM keys and now they want to store the content as well. It’s unclear what’s going to happen next. Let’s hope we know what we’re doing.
Related GigaOM Pro Research: How to Manage Access to Digital Content
Well said, Adam.
“…but the other content is stuck.”
You are assuming that absolute worst in a reality that will never happen.
Apple is the industry leader and they aren’t going anywhere. Comparing them to the industry losers is a terrible analogy since companies like MS never had a fighting chance because they were so late to the game. Which means investing in their technology was a risky/dumb choice in the first place.
Investing in a company that has already laid the ground work and defined an industry is not something to be shaking in your boots about. That is like telling people to stop investing in solar power because one day the Sun might burn out.
And by the time companies like Microsoft brought their DRM’d media to the table, it was too late. The game had already been won. At that point, everyone was mimicking Apple in a feeble attempt to gain market share.
You are also assuming that Apple isn’t trying to push the movie and TV industry to allow them to offer their content free from DRM restrictions. In the near future, they could also release a DRM unlock for all videos in the store for a small fee just like they did for the music collection.
Whether you are for or against the idea of cloud computing, you can only speculate at this point. And while your speculations are fear-mongering and negative to attract page hits for your blog, I like to believe there is two sides to every story.
But worrying about companies like Apple, MS, and Google and whether or not you can use/play their content in the future is like worrying about Burger King overthrowing McDonalds, McDonalds disappearing from the face of this planet, and how you are going to be able to find a Big Mac after that happens. It will never happen. Some things are just too big to disappear. And investing in any of those top three tech companies is a smart choice. Because if something does go wrong, they will probably offer the solution that their customers will need to keep on enjoying their media.
And if for some reason Apple does go belly up, and they stop producing devices to play your content on, I am sure someone will release a way to convert it or the competitor that defeated Apple at their own game would build the functionality to play their files into the new media player that the entire world is now using instead of iTunes.
You sounds like just another person set in his ways that fears change. I am here to tell you CHANGE IS GOOD and I welcome our new cloud computing overlords.
Apple without Steve Jobs can die a slow death.
never say never…. growing up I never thought and mp3 would take over cds… now look where we are.
Good post.
Google ChromeOS is going to move even more into the cloud and there are important issues to consider about “backup” etc.
long live physical media. jobs it out to kill it!
i’m an apple fan but cd’s, dvd’s, Blu Ray(!) are essential. to go to cloud computing is to be totally dependant. when “they” have you, you’ll have no choice; when you have not choice, you’ll pay what the want you to and that’ll just be the begining
If all the wireless carriers follow AT&T into metered data plans, cloud computing is going to die before it even gets off the ground.
Ditto mobile video.
I don’t trust companies and the “cloud”. It’s all big hype with little advantage and many risks. My own data? I would never give my important data to, say, Google’s services (docs, mail, my real-life location, pictures etc.) and never backup my stuff to a service I don’t know well enough.
Regarding purchased media – I don’t want to buy the right to access some media; I want to freaking own it. On a disc, on a computer, on a backup drive, on a PVR, on a phone and/or iPad… I want to have it with me. That’s why I’d never buy, say, a Kindle (not even one with a color screen). I want my media to be with me, not on some server. And, with hard drive prices lowering, it’s just a matter of time, and we will all be able to store everything we need – locally. But I’m afraid many people won’t want to…
Don’t trust the cloud and don’t buy DRM media. Lot’s of people got screwed when Apple shut Lala.com down. We can’t trust that our media will live in perpetuity in the cloud. Backup your content. Get a couple terabytes of storage and put all your music and movies there. Renting streams is a great way to go for instant gratification but if you treasure your media keep it within your control. And there is no reason to have to buy the same album over and over again. You paid once and that should be enough. The band didn’t have to re-record the album so why should you have to pay for it again.
Agreed! Acceptance without careful thought in advance on the pros and cons is truly foolish.
“I own 300 iOS apps, 1,200 movies, 200 music videos and over 18,000 songs where over 5,000 of those songs were purchased in iTunes.”
Your honesty is commmendable but $5000 worth of music is a little hard to believe,but as we say in the great white north chaqun a son gout
Don’t forget about the young people you mentioned in the first paragraph. You think we’ll be “buying” all of the locked-down streaming stuff?
Consider where those YouTube-watching teenagers get hard copies of their music today. Not iTunes. YouTube. It’s trivial to rip an MP3 from a YouTube video.
Where do they get movies? Pirate Bay. Most of them ripped from DVDs which, by the way, have DRM on them. Lot of good that did.
The fact that this is illegal (except in Spain) doesn’t make it any less of a reality. While not everyone may condone it, you have to admit that it’s a check on the power of the corporations that we don’t want to control our data. If this future does come to pass, then it’ll turn more and more regular people into grog-drinking, swashbuckling pirates.
Or perhaps all of the teenage pirates today will grow up to take over the tech and media companies.
Your last line is an interesting one… I’m in that recently entered the industry group. I pirated everything, because why not, it was free and getting caught is easily avoidable. But now that my income depends on media purchases, I’m thinking twice. Irony.
Re: “We already voted that digital is the future since iTunes sales will pass the sales of physical CDs very soon…” – Compact disks ARE digital. You mean consumers have voted against having their music in a physical format. (Why does this distinction matter? Because of the well-known view that digital music – on a CD, a hard drive, flash drive or wherever – sounds colder, harsher, less subtle or otherwise inferior to analog music, the form that’s stored on vinyl.)
How is this any different from Spotify, Rdio, MOG, etc? Scale and market acceptance for Apple will be higher, but the issues involved in having all of our media in the cloud aren’t specific to Apple.
I concur that this is the case with movies and tv shows currently. However, music on the iTunes store is DRM-free, and that’s largely due to Apple banging on that door until it opened. I don’t like that there is DRM on the movies and TV shows, but I want to point something out. There are very few movies or TV episodes I would watch more than once. However, I could listen to lots of music many times over. I’m one of those more likely to spend $.99 to rent a TV show than to buy it for $2.99 as I doubt I’d want to watch it more than 2 more times (I could rent it 3 total times before I’d paid for keeping it…)
Am I missing something with all this iTunes in the cloud talk? I use apps that have been out for months like Audiogalaxy that allow *me* to be my own cloud, storing my data from my own home on my own inexpensive hard drives available to me wherever I go. Why would I want it any other way? As soon as someone comes out with a dropbox clone that can be served up from home I’ll do that too. Try Air Video for your movies and Cinq for your photos… or get a Synology NAS if you are not as technically savy.
Luddite Alert!
DRM will no longer be an issue once we rent or stream all digital content. Youtube is the perfect example. You don’t ‘own’ their movies, but you can watch them any time. Spotify proves that this model also works for commercial material. I think Apple and other companies are going to create the Spotify model for iTunes, and make it work with movies too.
You pay a monthly fee to listen to all your favourite music, and to watch movies you pay a single rental fee. You don’t need to own any content anymore.
The only remaining question is : what if your explicitly WANT to own certain content? In the future, will you be able to buy optical discs? Will you be able to rip those discs to your computer’s HD?
What scares ME is that Apple will adopt their ‘walled-garden’ system of their mobile OS to work on home computers as well. They want to control EVERYTHING and I’m quite sure they’re looking into this at this very moment.
I use a bank. It’s not an absolute guarantee of safety, but I trust it as much and find it more convenient than burying money-stuffed jars in the back yard.
So too do I find the cloud for my media. Externalities like drive failure, fire, theft, giant lizards are just as much a risk, and as time has proven… DIY sure hasn’t always worked out or ever been convenient when it does.
I like the banking analogy. When I hit the ATM it gives me physical cash — which is just another form of value exchange — but most often I am paying with my debit card. My money lives in the cloud. I’ve actually never seen the physical cash from my paycheck nor would I want to. I just need access to my money when I need to pay for something. How are cloud based services any different from banking?
well said; i whole heartedly agree. this is why my “cloud” is streamed from local computer through my own FTP. therefore this allows ME to own the keys to my content. i shall call it “myCloud” :)
It wasn’t Apple that insisted on DRM, it was the record labels and the movie studios.
Go buy yourself a car with a governor on the engine – so you don’t break any speed limits.
On your own.
why would we let these guys remove our physical property again?
Do you buy and keep movies in the cloud? No, you have a subscription on netflix. Same for music. Get rhapsody or another streaming service and free yourself from the itunes tyrany!
Rhapsody rules!
Backups? Eww I got hard drives, CD’s, DVD’s, where did I back that one song up at? I don’t know, but I might find it in one day, three tops. Ok I have new music on my hard drive do I back it up to CD when I have 100 MB or 200 MB? Then when I transfer it to DVD do I do it alphabetically or genre? Do I keep the CD too? Just in case? And if the hard drive does go bad the music truly is gone, sadly this one has caused me more stress than any normal person would. If I buy music I have to work my way up to 5,000 songs with Rhapsody you work backwards 5,000 songs up front $5,000 later. If they go out of business there will be another company $15 – 5,000 songs instantly. Stuck with Apple? Nope works on PC, Android, Sansa. And the best part … oh my God I’ve done .mp3, ogg vorbis, .wma, .aac, back to .mp3 NEVER AGAIN BABY!
Oh, if you are new to music CD’s DO sound better, but I haven’t touched mine for at least a year, but most of my stuff I’ve heard probably thousands of times. Another bonus is if you stream your music your kids will never know about the time when you listened to Lady GaGa so you could score with that chick that one time, if you have it on CD, they will find it. YET ANOTHER bonus people don’t have to listen to your music they can listen to what they like too, because you have it all.
Apple will go bankrupt again for the same reasons than before: a closed licensing system (vs. opensource systems, such as Android and Symbiam). And this time Microsoft will not be able to save Apple from going belly up. The world is going WIRELESS, yes, but it is also going PAYLESS. It is going for volume, not for absurd margins on market niches. In today’s global world economy, you can’t stop anyone from sharing their music files and DVDs with our 6 billion “friends”, who we have conveniently tagged in our Facebook pages for easy access. The music and film industry cannot tell me or anyone not to let my next door neighbor watch the last DVD I have purchased any more than they can tell pretty much the whole world not to share music and movies with people outside your street block. You don’t need 6 billion hard copies now, only 1 is needed due to technology advancements (2 if you want to make a second backup). The Chinese are pretty much producing everything for the rest of the world now, 20 years from now they will continue to do so, but with their own labels. What is Apple or Microsoft going to do about it? Nothing, they will join them, they will partner. The telecoms will not be able to do anything about the new era of wireless and cloud systems, because if needed Google will send enough satellites in orbit to make all Telecoms obsolete. The Telecoms will partner too. What the writer of the article failed to note is that the kid that’s telling you that he/she prefers Youtube to TV does so for 2 reasons: 1. It is FREE. 2. It is ON DEMAND. If you don’t fit both categories, you will be out of business, bottom line. And Apple does not meet either of them, nor I see meeting them in the future with their obsesion of having to pay for the air you breath once you buy an apple product. The future is Wireless Communications and Distributed Computing (swarms). I only see Google in that future, and of course Chinese joint ventures (or even 100% Chinese capital owned companies).
Well said. You should be posting to this blog, though its recent conservatism would probably not allow so.
What a load of crap! Statements with do actual data or analysis to back it up are just opinions. And your opinion appears to be un-informed.
Er, wrong. Nice theory though.
“Right now, most of the content you own is stored locally on our Macs or iOS devices.”
No it isn’t.
If you had a real computer most of your content would never have been locked in the first place.
Re: THE WHITE ALBUM. hopefully the issue about compatability and file types will become an issue the “cloud company” worries about. The whole idea of streaming is that you don’t have a physical file. Buy a new music player, and get your streamed music.. No problems, ten years later get your music stream via laser beam or what ever.. The music is still the same. As long as the cloud is there right?
I like this article because it raises a couple of good questions about privacy and ownership. My comment might be a bit black/white and skipping a couple of steps but:
We need to make/keep the content able to migrate or able to store locally. I personally believe that if individual can’t self control access to content it can handicap his/her freedom of choice and development. It should not depend on third parties or the person wallet.
The arts, literature, study material, News, Music and Movies help in developing our opinions and way of thinking. Some payment to develop it a to distribute it should be okay, but it should not restricted access or be controlled by third parties. It feels in some ways to me as Entartete Kunst.
In these days of Pandora, why anyone would purchase 5,000 songs from Apple is a mystery. It simply makes no sense to waste all that money on something it will take about 400 hours to listen to each time (at five minutes per song.) That’s 400 hours that could be spent exploring new music elsewhere. No offense, but financially crazy and musically timid.
There’s personal files and then there’s entertainment content. Yes, you will always need to back up your personal files like family photos and whatnot. But entertainment content like music and movies?
“Perhaps, you’ll buy the same content over and over again”
Why? There’s no point in buying it in physical form and backing it up. There’s little value in owning a digital file when the same content is available on-demand. Yea DRM is stupid but so is squirreling away TBs of bad TV shows that are readily available from Netflix. The old distribution model is dying. The cloud is steadily driving content costs down across the entire system to $0.
I cannot get myself do deal with itunes after using zune. MS got music services right with the Zune by allowing a subscription service that gives/offers DRM free songs.
I have to agree with you, I only use iTunes to sync the bare minimum to my iPhone. Otherwise I’m on my Zune for music. The only complaint with Zune is being forced to sync it at least once every 30 days to renew the DRM on the subscription tracks (it lives in the car a lot).
I disagree that teenagers necessarily or even generally prefer YouTube over TV, but I realize that this point is not essential to your thesis.
Blu-ray may be a bag of hurt for those who want to put us into digital downloads, but I’m sticking with that for the time being. It’s better than any download, and eventually, we’ll be able to rip it to some non-DRM media.
Movie rental is probably the better choice for those we don’t want to buy in Blu-ray format. I converted all my iTunes purchases to iTunes Plus. But most of my music is ripped from used CDs from Amazon.
GM was once the envy of the auto industry and look where they are. Certainly Apple will not remain on top forever. It is just never in the cards. Woolworth used to be the number one retailer and does anybody shop there anymore. I could go on and on, but why bother. Democratic Capitalism has a way of rotating those on top with those on the bottom, or somewhere in between. It is true for countries and for corporations alike.
Let us not forget it was not many years ago that Apple almost ceased to exist. They seem to only be able to execute when Jobs is at the helm. What happens when he moves on in one way or another. Who’s to say the next CEO would be as smart as he is. And let us not forget that Apple had the desktop publishing and pc arena all to itself and MS came along and cleaned there clock. Most computers are still running Windows and in the pc arena Apple is still an also-ran.
Profits not market share make the king. Apple’s profits are one of the highest in the industry who gives a flying shit if their OS market share is less than 10%. They make more profit on each device sold than Dell, HP or who-ever.
Why the focus on Apple and Amazon? It’s not their fault that iTunes and the Kindle store have DRM’ed content.
You need to be ranting at Time Warner and Viacom and New Corps and Bantam and Random House. It’s the studios and the publishers who are hanging onto the old models, much as the music studios did earlier on.
The iTunes store accounts for a mere 6% of Apple’s revenue. In case you’re bad at math, that means that 94% of their revenue comes from selling hardware: iPods, iPhones, iPads, and Macs. Cheap, easily available content helps Apple sell hardware. That’s their bread and butter.
So don’t rant at Apple. Rant at the publishers. Tell them you want DRM-free, device-independent content. Tell them that they need to get with the program.
The music industry did it. So can they.
This is a twisted argument that doesn’t even fit the facts. First of all, storing PURCHASED content in the cloud and RENTAL content in the cloud are two different animals. I want my PURCHASED content stored locally, and this is still an option from iTunes. In fact, PURCHASED content will be handled pretty much the same way as it always has. The $0.99 RENTALS can be stored in the cloud and streamed. Why this is a problem I can’t see. I currently rent TONS of content from Amazon and I LOVE the fact that it is streamed and not downloaded. I don’t want rental movies on my HD unless I’m getting ready for a long trip where I might need some content while I’m outside wifi range–like on an airplane. USUALLY, I rent a movie at the time I want to view it, despite the fact that I can wait up to 30 days to watch it. I can’t see why I would want to rent today to watch it in 3 weeks, for example. I do usually rent a few movies a few DAYS before a trip and download them, as I said, for when I’m out of wifi range, but MOST of my rental content is NOT downloaded. Nothing Apple is offering is really new. It’s available from Amazon and Hulu and Netflix and others already. Apple TV will simply make it easier for the less tech saavy.
As to iTunes $0.99 MUSIC? It is ALREADY non-DRMed .aac format music that you can play with any player that supports .aac (and that is MANY players on all major OS’s) and also easily recoded to mp3 or, if you’re worried that mp3 (which is, technically, proprietary) will not always be free, ogg vorbis or FLAC.
This article does not contain a single real fact, just a bunch of straw men. Grow up people.
This is a twisted argument that doesn’t even fit the facts. First of all, storing PURCHASED content in the cloud and RENTAL content in the cloud are two different animals. I want my PURCHASED content stored locally, and this is still an option from iTunes. In fact, PURCHASED content will be handled pretty much the same way as it always has. The $0.99 RENTALS can be stored in the cloud and streamed. Why this is a problem I can’t see. I currently rent TONS of content from Amazon and I LOVE the fact that it is streamed and not downloaded. I don’t want rental movies on my HD unless I’m getting ready for a long trip where I might need some content while I’m outside wifi range–like on an airplane. USUALLY, I rent a movie at the time I want to view it, despite the fact that I can wait up to 30 days to watch it. I can’t see why I would want to rent today to watch it in 3 weeks, for example. I do usually rent a few movies a few DAYS before a trip and download them, as I said, for when I’m out of wifi range, but MOST of my rental content is NOT downloaded. Nothing Apple is offering is really new. It’s available from Amazon and Hulu and Netflix and others already. Apple TV will simply make it easier for the less tech saavy.
As to iTunes $0.99 MUSIC? It is ALREADY non-DRMed .aac format music that you can play with any player that supports .aac (and that is MANY players on all major OS’s) and also easily recoded to mp3 or, if you’re worried that mp3 (which is, technically, proprietary) will not always be free, ogg vorbis or FLAC.
This article does not contain a single real fact, just a bunch of straw men. Grow up people.
BTW, DRM-free is courtesy of Apple, NOT the music industry. Apple has campaigned for DRM-free since day one. They offered DRM only as long as they were required to, even after the music industry tried to strong arm them by allowing Amazon to sell DRM-free music while requiring iTunes to use DRM. NOTHING about DRM is good for Apple. When the RIAA, the MPAA, the television networks, book publishers and the other content providers realize that it isn’t in their own interest to treat their customers like criminals that will change. I guarantee Apple will jump om DRM-free as soon as content providers allow them to.
Oh, and Apple didn’t ever “go bankrupt.” They were in financial trouble before Steve Jobs returned because Apple lost it’s focus on what makes it Apple, NOT because of closed-source. Instead of focusing on unique, cutting-edge hardware and software they were making the same beige boxes everyone else was. If closed, proprietary systems don’t make money, explain Windows.
And I am mystified as to why people who hate Apple’s products so much care about the freedom of those of us who like them. I bought both my iPhones and my iPad knowing Flash was not available. I bought my HTC EVO 4G with the idea that Flash was supported. Guess what? Flash on Froyo may as well not be there for as often as it works without extensive hacking. I enjoy a little hardware hacking in my spare time but my mobile devices are for convenience. They should just work. I love my EVO, but not because of Flash support, because the vast majority of Flash, and none of it that I care about, is supported. Since you consider the iPad a crappy device and don’t want one, why do you care if it supports Flash? I love it, without Flash. It’s not as if you’re being forced to buy one. Feel free to take a pass.
You miss an important point.
You Assume that you own the music you have bought on itunes! You do not! You Have been conned!
When we bought music in physical format, if we decided we no longer wanted that music we could sell the physical object second hand.
You are not allowed to sell your MP3 second hand. the terms and conditions of your purchase from itunes preclude it.
In my opinion if you cant sell it, you don’t own it.
A court ruling has recently backed this point of view up, clearly ruling that itunes sells a license to listen, not a copy of the music. (the case happened because musicians get different rates of royalty for licensing their music than selling it)
With a model like spotify you pay a subscription and receive a license to listen to all of the music, on any device that has a spotify player app installed.
It doesn’t matter if that’s your computer or your mobile,or you could be at a friend’s house, and log in to your music account on their machine.
A much more viable solution.
The notion of having a record collection is obsolete, you pay to acess the record collection of humanity. Personal taste and discover is defined by your playlists.
Until anyone solves this I would recommend you don’t buy music through itunes- you don’t actually own it. Buy the CD and rip it or subscribe to a service like spotify.
What he said.
Absolutely right.
Bunk theory. There are plenty of things you can own but not sell. And even with CDs and physical media, you are still limited in how and where you can broadcast the music/movie/whatever.
But what makes any of us think we can “own” recorded performances, regardless of media? The notion is patently ludicrous. When we purchase music on CD, we really only own the CD, cover art, etc. Not the music itself.
as a general rule of thumb, one must be cautious when a company controls all the technology. resources and information = power. we just have to be careful that we dont let go of ALL of our power.
http://www.danfonseca.wordpress.com
a minor point – you don’t, and probably never have, owned any software or music/movies/whatever. you _licensed_ it but you had a locally stored copy (on DVD, CD, diskette, vinyl or whatever). so it felt like owning it but it was (and is) a mirage. like many people i have my own doubts about not-my-managed storage. but the gory specifics about what you can/can’t do with the digital copies, even DRM-free licenses, isn’t your decision. IMHO a lack of tangible media in my control is the Really Big Deal, not how you’re connected to the storage mechanism with “your” files. my own solution is to get music/movies/software on some physical media _and_ put copies out in the cloud (clearly violating most license agreements). but that way if someone else closes my connection to some remote storage i can restore it elsewhere.
IMHO we should be thanking Steve Jobs for dragging the music industry into the 21st Century. The Big Four all hate Apple because we as consumers benefit more from iTunes than the oligopolies that control traditional music distribution. And have you forgotten that Apple REMOVED DRM from iTunes music? Where would we be without Apple? Stuck in a world where four multinational conglomerates conspire and collude to control the music we listen to while successfully stifling all attempts to bring music to the Internet.
It is more interesting to think about whether you’ll be able to get the artist, filmaker or author. Will exclusivity deals limit your choice to particular services, want to buy the Beatles online, oh no, you can’t.
Those back catalogues, are the publishers going to bother to put it online. To date the answer appears to be no.
Used Apples iTunes search, found what your looking for? It’s not that good, a lot of metadata is missing that might make it useful.
A lot of this is fixable, but there has to be a will to do it. Most companies are only interested in their current offerings not the back catalogue. The real scare is that you might never be able to get the item you’d like because someone can’t be bothered to make it available to you.
DRM only hurts people who don’t pirate. People who do pirate never have to deal with it.
I did’t read all comments but I think everybody is missing the point here. Every change happens on the market first and, then on the juridical/government/regulation instances later. I am not sure we have seen much of these yet but I am sure they will happen.
For instance, here in latin america, countries’ governments like Brazil and Chile are implementing phone number portability allowing you to keep your phone number when changing carriers. I don’t see how this could be different from what you are talking about.
In short, we must fight to have good regulations to allow us to move if we feel we want to. The content we bought is ours and if we move to another “carrier”, it should be told so, so that we can see our content there too. If they are going cloud, they must pay the price for it. As we are giving them more power, they should deal with the additional responsibility as well.
Honestly, will you really trust the people to buy or not buy something as a way to protest about a model? Most people don’t think about the future as you do. If you really want to make a difference and interfere, try changing the speech and start talking about government regulations, portability, etc.
By the way: I also prefer to rent for $0.99 then to buy for what ever and I also agree that listening to must (and buying it) is different and seeing movies (and renting then). I think both models will be available in the future (rent and buying) and that is why I think portability and regulations are the most important thing to discuss.
Kind regards,
Amir Samary