Radio Free Tenleytown; or DRM and you, why Steve Jobs Sucks it
Miss Viking gave me a great birthday present this year. Being aware of my passion for music as well as my compulsion to try and drown myself in the Sport and Health pool as a means of exercise, she bought me a water-proof mp3 player that fits on the back of my goggles. It’s a nifty little gadget. Instead of using standard ear buds to transmit sounds it utilizes smooth pads that rest on either side of my head just in front of my ears and behind my eyes. These pads conduct sound into my ear canals through my skull bones somehow, and seem to work best when there is water in my ears, i.e. when I’m swimming.
Infused with a new motivation for the pool I began planning my workout play lists before I was even home. In my head I transposed likely songs with swim sets and asked myself crucial training questions such as, “should I use Bill Conti’s ‘Gonna Fly Now’ at the begging of my sprint set to get the workout started on an inspirational note, or should I save it for the tail end of a long distance swim to restore my flagging determination?” These are serious questions. What if my ‘Rage Against the Machine’ is overheard by someone sharing a lane with me? Will I be ostracized as some kind of radical? Will people realize that the politics of the music is secondary to the raw aggression that will help to fuel my workout? Will some aquatically inclined Senate staffer or CIA analyst have me put on a list populated by the kinds of people that jog while listening to Woody Guthrie and fuck to Barry Manilow?
These questions would have to wait for answering. When I returned home, a horrible truth hit me. I’ve purchased a fair chunk of my music from iTunes. I’ve always been vaguely aware of DRM and what it means, but like Nancy Reagan and every other good American I’m unable to appreciate the full impact of an abstract idea until it has direct consequences on my own life. There will be no Bill Conti swim playlists, because iTunes has gone above and beyond in protecting myself from the digital rights to the music that I purchased. For those of you unfamiliar with the way iTunes works, any song purchased from their on-line music store is playable only on an iPod. This is there way of ‘protecting musical copyright.’
I’m all in favor of protecting the rights of artists and contrary to what one might assume about my economic philosophy based on what I’ve written in the past, I’m pretty much a free market guy. I’ve never downloaded music illegally, and if a friend has a CD I enjoy I’m much more likely to purchase it myself than I am to have him rip a copy for me. But the way that Apple approaches this whole issue of digital rights gets under my skin. Apple is a corporation that has always tried to sell itself as an outsider with a conscience. They bill themselves as the thinking persons alternative to Microsoft, but they utilize many of the same sketchy business practices that made the Evil Empire the Evil Empire. There is no difference between Microsoft’s old practice of foisting Windows upon PC users and Apple forcing people to play their music on an iPod. They don’t lock iTunes music to the iPod to protect the artists. They do it so that they can keep consumers locked into the iPod in the face of planned obsolescence. When your iPod eventually dies or is no longer supported, you have little option but to purchase a new iPod unless you want to sacrifice whatever music you’ve purchased from Apple.
Until copyright laws are updated to reflect the realities of current information technology, Apple is well within its rights to act like a giant hypocrite. But they shouldn’t expect to hold onto their carefully crafted image as a ‘different kind of tech firm’ while they are doing it.
posted by DC Viking at 1:04 PM
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