A nice refresher, from the Sunday NYT no less, about how iTunes and DRM hurts perfectly innocent customers, fails to stop piracy, and reduces competition. Bonus stat: emusic implies every music label except the big four now allows at least some distribution of tunes without DRM.
[…] Via Luis Villa, tomorrow’s New York Times has a decent article headlined Want an iPhone? Beware the iHandcuffs. The article title is right (Villa’s summary is a better description, if not a better headline: “iTunes and DRM hurts perfectly innocent customers, fails to stop piracy, and reduces competition”), but it leads off wrong: like its slimmer iPod siblings, the iPhone’s music-playing function will be limited by factory-installed “crippleware.” […]
well, I think that’s a good start (what says emusic). When will be the day those four companies understand that DRMs aren’t the best way to combat the ‘piracy’? I have bought DRMed music on iTunes but, obviously I have had to ‘violate’ the DRMs using the hacks we all know. It’s obvious. But those companies are really blind.
But emusic seems to demand a subscription of 12.99 Euros per month, though that can apparently be cancelled immediately. That’s 12.99 that I have to pay for the first song that I decide I want to download, even if I don’t find anything else that I want to download. The existence of a free-trial period doesn’t fully remove this feeling.
It doesn’t sound like customer-friendly pricing. I can’t see this allowing one emusic song to be such a hit via direct linking and individual downloads that it makes emusic famous.
And that free trial period is not possible without entering your credit card details, allowing automatic billing after the free-trial period. This is the AOL way of billing that people know and hate.
[…] Am currently attending a talk on the DMCA 1201 rulemaking. I’ve become just too cynical a bastard to really attend these things; the first speaker here is a shill for the content industry (albeit a very bright shill), and I’m having a hard time not laughing out loud at some of his claims. (He’s riffing off the New York Times article I blogged about the other day, claiming that it justifies DRM, despite the entire thrust of the article being about how bad DRM is for users.) So… argh, I had intended to liveblog it, but it just pisses me off too much. Hopefully the other speaker (Jonathan Band, who it sounds like is a skeptic) won’t piss me off quite so much. […]
If you don’t want to buy stuff from iTunes, buy the CD instead. What’s the big deal?