So, Steve entered the blogosphere today (as pointed out earlier by Cole and Bill) with an amazing surgical strike against DRM. It appears as though the Fruit Company only grudgingly went along with the bare minimum DRM in order to placate the music cartel into playing with them online.
In the very logical, concise statement, Steve lays his cards on the table. He's all in. DRM is lame, and is nothing more than a tool for struggling monopolies to attempt to maintain the status quo in a changing marketplace (my words, not his. I'm paraphrasing).
If he wins this hand, DRM as we know it is over. We can stop bending over and grabbing our ankles for the Big Labels. And we can continue legally buying music (and other media) online without having to worry (or even think about) the number of our own computers which have been authorized to play the files we bought.
If he loses this hand, we sink into a dark age, where the cartel is able to call the shots and we have no rights over the media we buy. Actually, we won't be able to actually buy media anymore. We'll be limited to leasing temporary licenses granting revokable permission to temporarily play a piece of media, subject to limitations and sanctions. Things like the Analog Hole will be plugged. We'll be locked out of our own media, from network, through the computer, and into our ears. Everything will be controlled by The Big Labels. DRM Rootkits will multiply, legally. We will hand control over our computers and media players to the cartel.
I know which player I'm rooting for. The stakes for this game are much higher than a simple game of Texas Holdem.
So, Steve entered the blogosphere today (as pointed out earlier by Cole and Bill) with an amazing surgical strike against DRM. It appears as though the Fruit Company only grudgingly went along with the bare minimum DRM in order to placate the music cartel into playing with them online.
In the very logical, concise statement, Steve lays his cards on the table. He's all in. DRM is lame, and is nothing more than a tool for struggling monopolies to attempt to maintain the status quo in a changing marketplace (my words, not his. I'm paraphrasing).
If he wins this hand, DRM as we know it is over. We can stop bending over and grabbing our ankles for the Big Labels. And we can continue legally buying music (and other media) online without having to worry (or even think about) the number of our own computers which have been authorized to play the files we bought.
If he loses this hand, we sink into a dark age, where the cartel is able to call the shots and we have no rights over the media we buy. Actually, we won't be able to actually buy media anymore. We'll be limited to leasing temporary licenses granting revokable permission to temporarily play a piece of media, subject to limitations and sanctions. Things like the Analog Hole will be plugged. We'll be locked out of our own media, from network, through the computer, and into our ears. Everything will be controlled by The Big Labels. DRM Rootkits will multiply, legally. We will hand control over our computers and media players to the cartel.
I know which player I'm rooting for. The stakes for this game are much higher than a simple game of Texas Holdem.
There are lots of people (Gardner, Brian, Tama, some /. trolls) posting interesting and thoughtful responses to the iTunes University service. It seems like the (online) consensus is something like “It sucks as a concept – forcing universities to lock content behind walled gardens, restricting access and requiring proprietary playback mechanisms.”
This is a valid point, worth consideration. However, at the risk of appearing to be an Apple apologist, I’d suggest that the alternatives be considered.
- Don’t publish the content (status quo). This somehow feels like a tighter lock-down than publishing into iTMS.
- Publish on your own. People are doing this. It’s hard to scale, though. Apple’s offering infrastructure and systems that would be hard to replicate. It is possible, of course, as shown by MIT OpenCourseWare.
- Create a new iTunes + iTMS clone, perhaps open source, that could be used. Technically possible. Is it worth the effort and resources to do this, though? I’m not sure.
And, I haven’t seen anything requiring exclusive distribution “rights” being granted to Apple. The content remains property of the university, who is of course free to repackage and republish to their heart’s content. Don’t like iTunes? Write your own client. Don’t like AAC? Convert a copy to MP3 or Ogg Vorbis or Real or WMA or whatever. Don’t want the only online copy of the file to be served from Cupertino? Stick a copy on your own server, and provide some kind of service to let people access it.
From what I see, and I have no insider info (so I could of course be wrong), all the iTunes U. service offers is an option for publishing media easily, into the most popular (legal) online content distribution system on the planet.
I’m stepping out on a limb here, but if Apple provided a website front-end, and the option to use MP3 as the file format, would the objections remain? It’s not as simple as “Commercial/proprietary systems suck!” – the option, for many, is to not be able to effectively share content at all. Apple isn’t intending to restrict, they’re attempting to enable.
Update: I just talked with someone at Apple who would know – and iTunes U supports any file format that iTunes can grok – you can publish .mp3 (or .wav, or .aiff, or Apple Lossless) audio, .mp4 video, even .pdf files (that’s how album art is handled) as well as the “default” formats of .aac etc… This means there is no lock-in to having an iPod as portable playback device (and even the .aac files can be converted by iTunes to .mp3 now).
There are lots of people (Gardner, Brian, Tama, some /. trolls) posting interesting and thoughtful responses to the iTunes University service. It seems like the (online) consensus is something like “It sucks as a concept – forcing universities to lock content behind walled gardens, restricting access and requiring proprietary playback mechanisms.”
This is a valid point, worth consideration. However, at the risk of appearing to be an Apple apologist, I’d suggest that the alternatives be considered.
- Don’t publish the content (status quo). This somehow feels like a tighter lock-down than publishing into iTMS.
- Publish on your own. People are doing this. It’s hard to scale, though. Apple’s offering infrastructure and systems that would be hard to replicate. It is possible, of course, as shown by MIT OpenCourseWare.
- Create a new iTunes + iTMS clone, perhaps open source, that could be used. Technically possible. Is it worth the effort and resources to do this, though? I’m not sure.
And, I haven’t seen anything requiring exclusive distribution “rights” being granted to Apple. The content remains property of the university, who is of course free to repackage and republish to their heart’s content. Don’t like iTunes? Write your own client. Don’t like AAC? Convert a copy to MP3 or Ogg Vorbis or Real or WMA or whatever. Don’t want the only online copy of the file to be served from Cupertino? Stick a copy on your own server, and provide some kind of service to let people access it.
From what I see, and I have no insider info (so I could of course be wrong), all the iTunes U. service offers is an option for publishing media easily, into the most popular (legal) online content distribution system on the planet.
I’m stepping out on a limb here, but if Apple provided a website front-end, and the option to use MP3 as the file format, would the objections remain? It’s not as simple as “Commercial/proprietary systems suck!” – the option, for many, is to not be able to effectively share content at all. Apple isn’t intending to restrict, they’re attempting to enable.
Update: I just talked with someone at Apple who would know – and iTunes U supports any file format that iTunes can grok – you can publish .mp3 (or .wav, or .aiff, or Apple Lossless) audio, .mp4 video, even .pdf files (that’s how album art is handled) as well as the “default” formats of .aac etc… This means there is no lock-in to having an iPod as portable playback device (and even the .aac files can be converted by iTunes to .mp3 now).
I would have blogged this sooner, but was having The Day From Hell™ – regardless, this is pretty cool stuff. Apple has opened up the iTunes media warehouse for any campus to share audio and video via the iTMS interface. This will allow any campus to replicate something like the Stanford iTunes Experience relatively easily, with the possibility to hook into things like lecturecasting, alumni communication, community outreach, etc…
I’m going to be cheerleading and doing whatever I can to get the University of Calgary to take them up on this.
There are some issues, like the perceived lock-in to the iPod, and the need to have iTunes on the desktop. Both aspects have some very strong arguments both for and against, which I’m not going to rehash now (but am giving them a lot of thought, and Brian’s given it a go already).
One thing I’d like to know is how to integrate the iTMS as a part of a larger ecosystem – it can’t be an exclusive engagement, so there would be nothing preventing a campus from also producing .mp3 versions of appropriate files and hosting them in a non-iTMS solution for the non-iTunes-using, non-iPod-toting, or Linux-using crowds.
I would have blogged this sooner, but was having The Day From Hell™ – regardless, this is pretty cool stuff. Apple has opened up the iTunes media warehouse for any campus to share audio and video via the iTMS interface. This will allow any campus to replicate something like the Stanford iTunes Experience relatively easily, with the possibility to hook into things like lecturecasting, alumni communication, community outreach, etc…
I’m going to be cheerleading and doing whatever I can to get the University of Calgary to take them up on this.
There are some issues, like the perceived lock-in to the iPod, and the need to have iTunes on the desktop. Both aspects have some very strong arguments both for and against, which I’m not going to rehash now (but am giving them a lot of thought, and Brian’s given it a go already).
One thing I’d like to know is how to integrate the iTMS as a part of a larger ecosystem – it can’t be an exclusive engagement, so there would be nothing preventing a campus from also producing .mp3 versions of appropriate files and hosting them in a non-iTMS solution for the non-iTunes-using, non-iPod-toting, or Linux-using crowds.