Is Big Brother on Your iPod?

For Islamists, yes. God may have mercy on them, but I won’t.

I am so glad I live in Australia. Enough said. I know these things affect us to, don’t get my wrong, but both parties get SO worked up over it. My suggestion - get a beer.

Careful, BB. Keep this up and I might start liking you! ha.

You’ll find that I’m more or less consistently anti-batshit craziness, whether it’s Apple fanatics, or right-wingers who support torture for Muslims, abdication of human rights and civil liberties, or support the govt spying on every aspect of our private lives with no accountability or oversight—while criticizing liberals for being for “big government” because they want to tax rich people and corporations.

Granted, Apple fanatics are less important in the grand scheme of things, but they’re still annoying. 

Um… Wasn’t this about DRM?

This argument sounds like a lot of hot air to me, at least right now.  Is anyone seriously and currently inconvenienced by Apple’s Fairplay system WHILE DOING SOMETHING LEGAL with the music they have purchased?

It seems to me that if you must transfer your music to a non-iPod device, you can buy your music on CD instead of downloading it from iTunes.

If you are worried about what you might want to do with your music in the future, keep buying CD’s.

DRM is not there to protect Apple.  It is there to protect the writers and performers of the music.

Presumably Apple are keeping a tight rein on Fairplay to try and postpone the time it will be reverse engineered.  If Fairplay is compromised, the digital distribution of music will be compromised.

So…

1.  DRM is essential, and justified.  You might not like it, but then this is not about you…

2. Fairplay is tight, and needs to be.

3. You have alternatives - buy a CD if you don’t like it.  No-one is asking you to buy from iTunes - and I never have,

4. I would say, in the longer term, that Apple will probably release some additional options for iTunes which will allow you to choose your DRM depending on what device you want to download to.

5. And it would be logical for Apple to release a DRM conversion tool which would enable you to migrate music from one form of protection to another.  If Microsoft’s DRM becomes popular then Apple will probably support it.  Trouble is, right now, it isn’t very popular and might not take off at all…

6. But music will never be DRM free.  And why should it?  You are asking the composers and musicians to give you the keys to their houses.  The trouble is these same musicians know full well that a great many of you will take the keys and help yourself to whatever you can.

I suspect that those who complain loudest about DRM are those with the naughtiest intent…

This discussion has got me thinking a lot on 1984, although to be honest my mind has been working it’s way to and from there since I read it in high school (a beat up copy I ‘borrowed’ from the school, which I asked for to read on my own).  And oskar, your comments of how you are forced to hide your opinions and project the views of others also reverberates Winston’s perspective.

Beeb, I’ve been going to this site regularly for the last few months, only recently posting on any articles myself, and you’ve been a sort of voice of reason throughout all the bs, and I really didn’t know you could cuss here, that’s pretty sweet.

Now, hopefully I got you’re attention, cause here comes a rant from someone who actually voted for a liberal (a gay one at that). 

After writing that, I’m beginning to worry about posting too much personal information, as someone who did any digging could figure out who I voted for (Glen Murray, former mayor of Winnipeg who pulled dipshit and ran for federal office, replacing the encumbant on the ticket who had chosen not to run against the quadriplegic conservative candidate because of the bad press over him taking a nap during a speech by the PM in the house of commons, while sitting directly behind said pm), but what the hell do I care, there’s already my email address which can be seen by anyone wanting to slide their mouse over my consistently used screen name, and so I could be harrased quite easily 4 years from now for this very post (which happened a couple years back for mentioning Orson Welles and Kevin Smith in the same sentence, a crime I was not guilty of as they had been given seperate sentences in the post), and I’m just going off again, aren’t I?

I had a tendency to rant on and on ever since I got the net, and I really should’ve created a blog back in the day, but I prefer forums as they are more of a dialogue than anything… except when it comes to me.  I like to ramble, but there are some points that I’ve been working up all throughout reading this long as hell bicker-fest. 

So here I go in no particular order:

1) taking out Iran would not solve your problems, it would not put an end to islamo-fascism, as the FREAKING TALIBAN ARE STILL AROUND, AS ARE THE FREAKING NAZIS! as can be evidenced by the fact that people are worried about antisemitism going on during the world cup in germany, as well as what’s going on in Kandahar.

2) more than 2 cities were ‘vaporized’ in WWII, just google Dresden if you must, you revisionist historian, you. 

3) both of you need to STOP GENERALIZING, using the word LIBERAL as if you’re Ann Coulter, while I can’t truly fault Beeb on this point as it was clear he was responding to Oskar in a satirical manner, what with the whole traitor bit.  so stop loading your arguments with such ‘fundamental’ points as to make it impossible to argue with you.  that’s not how you win a debate, that’s how you lead people to make comparisons between America and Nazi Germany (which, I must point out, NOBODY DID MADE SUCH A COMPARISON!) So, when you put it that way, you must be right since there’s no way for you to be wrong.

And now that I got all that out of my system (thank you for allowing me, btw), Oskar, you really haven’t stated very clearly why you are for DRM, other than arguing a counterargument over privacy infringement.  You see, people tend to have an agenda when they protest (I recommend you watch the episode of Penn and Teller’s Bullshit on the environment for evidence of that, if not for a valid argument on the environment) to get a sense of this.  It goes for both sides, but the thing is, that this whole argument is kinda superfluous.

What I mean is, yes DRM is easy to circumvent and NO, it doesn’t benifit the artists that it’s there, as evidenced by the Barenaked Ladies selling their most recent album on a USB thumbdrive with no DRM and the thumbdrive is rewritable, so you can use it for whatever purpose you want (maybe you remember the fake version of their first single from a while back on napster that went on for a minute and then told you to buy the freakin album).  BNL and a bunch of other canadian artists have banded together to form an opposing lobbying group in canada to prevent the canadian equivelant of the RIAA from dictating policy to the newly formed conservative government, basically saying that they don’t want to sue their fans.

And as for the argument on what’s legal, think for a second on WHAT is legal.  Currently the RIAA is working on making incidental copies of your purchased music subject to copyright.  This directly impacts DRM, as it’s existence allows them to control those incidental copies and regulate them, if not specifically charge you for ripping a cd (good luck when they try to make that one stick to something if it were to reach the supreme court, one would hope). 

Oskar, I can tell that you’re not a law major, or a history major, or maybe I’m making assumptions (which would be sily of me to do, considering the tirade I just went on for you doing that very thing), but just because the right to life is the most fundamental right in your set of “values” (which ironically doesn’t seem to apply to those who are not americans, although I would dispute that if someone is born in america, would that not make them americans?  I make this statement without knowing who’s holding who, but I might’ve listened to too much punk music in my youth not to be cynical of authority figures) doesn’t make it more important than the other rights guaranteed in your constitution, even if they are derivative. 

And hey, what about that other right that was ommitted from the Declaration of Independance (anyone know why?  feel free to post the answer and feel smart) but was DEEPLY ingrained into your system from the get-go, the right to property.  As a fiscal conservative, this should be right the $^** up there, since what’s the point of buying something if you just have to keep buying it over and over again?  AND THAT, my friends, is what this is all about.

Hollywood has made a business model over redtributing content every few years.  Look at Disney and their vault.  If you look further back, MGM would’ve been bought out decades ago if it weren’t for Gone With The Wind, instead of being bought out only a year or two ago by Sony.  They did it with VHS, they did it with Laserdisc, they did it with DVD.  And now, they’re getting ready to do it again with HD-DVD and Blu Ray.  In the meantime, they get to play around with digital distribution of low resolution video content over itunes and others until something reaches a saturation point, either SMART cable boxes with a GUI that wasn’t a pain in the ass to use with the 30 second response time that may more resemble a computer (mac mini, I’m looking at you) or...you know what, who gives a crap.  They want your money, it’s pretty much that simple.  You say free market, it isn’t free until there are free elections. 

Ouch, that probably hurt.  I mean, I felt that one.  What I mean is that they stack the deck, no matter how you look at it.  Through antitrust action like FairPlay (leave to the French to try and level the playing field), forcing you to buy the Blu Ray drive with the PS3 or buying up congressmen as if they were collectable trading cards, they like to bet on a sure thing.  And this is what Al Franken and other liberals are talking about when he pleads for publically funded open elections, in that then the laws would be made by people who believe in what they’re doing and saying (one would hope).  At the least it would get rid of the argument that those who have the advertising dollars sway the most votes, and those who suck the most corporate ^%# get the most advertising dollars.  All of a sudden the party founded by lincoln would have to go back to it’s core ideals and be able to back it up, and one would hope that if there was an open sort of air to it all that they would need to back it up with more than hot air, although maybe I’m stuck in a liberal fantasy land, which may in fact be the case.

As a film fanatic, I’ve invested heavily into DVD, and have been as a consumer on the front lines of corporate america wanting to make money again and again (double dipping with ‘special editions’ that may only mean they put it in a new box, or simply added a cardboard covering to it), and as a consumer I must fend for myself in this arena.  Luckily with OS X, we are in fact immune to the root-kits of Sony, or at least we would be if we were to inact basic security steps, such as not running as admin and being sceptical whenever the computer asks you for an admin password when not installing an application.  Not sure where I’m going with that line of thought, but I figured I’d throw it out there.

I kind of want to post more, I was thinking about how to adapt my long held belief on how to win the war on drugs (short version: legalize it) to the war on internet piracy.  Now, one way for them to do this is using bit torrent, the very device that is currently being used to download ‘illegal’ content.  Universal apparently has set up some sort of a deal to do just that, and Apple should jump on board as well. 

tWiT, my favorite podcast, recently did an episode on this very subject (in fact they constantly deal with the RIAA and their attempts to dictate the rules of the relationship) where I believe they were talking about using bit torrent within iTunes for downloading podcasts. 

This way, if you were for example the person offering this podcast through some sort of intermediary, you wouldn’t end up with those large bills for bandwidth as everyone who downloads it would be sharing it as they download as well as after it’s finished (although they could leave it open to the end user if they wanted to use these sorts of podcasts, just like they have 64 kbps and 128 kbps versions of a podcast, they could have bit torrent ones as well as ones that regular. 

They could also adjust the settings with itunes or whatever torrent program they use to either stop seeding after they’ve shared 100% (as much as they’ve downloaded, sharing the burden) as well as make it so the upload rate is only a few kb/s to keep your network from becoming bogged down.

By doing this, digital distribution becomes cheap and thus the overhead becomes low, and so they could charge less.  That’s the free market at work, so long as they didn’t think that they’ll simply charge what the market could bare, which is what they’re doing now with tv shows on itunes (paying for the convenience factor, as was mentioned in a past article I believe). 

Perhaps George Lucas will be proven right when he said that in the future most movies will be small independant ones.  It would be nice to think so, where sites like askaninja become commonplace and people make it big based on their merit (Lonely Island) as opposed to how much foriegn investment they can muster (Uwe Boll), which kind of brings it all home in ways, huh?

If you follow the trail of bread crumbs, you’ll see that Orrin Hatch, republican senator for Utah, is trying to pass a bill (Inducing Infringement of copyright act) that would make it illegal for people to allow you to circumvent copyright protection (something that those who first discovered the sony rootkits were worried about: getting sued for bypassing copyright protection), thus cancelling out a lot of what once fell under fair use.  I guess I should’ve started along these lines, but you guys had already taken it to such an extreme I couldn’t help myself.

So, if this were to pass into law, iTunes will no longer allow you to rip cds and any software that did would become illegal in the states.  Thus the loophole of being able to burn your itunes tracks to cd and then ripping them would become closed, locking you into one form of content (forcing you to buy your movies again and again, which if you ask me, goes against the right to property, if only in principle).  So if iTunes started selling HD content, you’d have to buy it again, and if you wanted to play it on something other than a mac or ipod, you’d have to buy it again (all of a sudden the whole UMD thing sony thrust down the throats of PSP owners is now the only option).  This locking down of content makes me yearn for a reasonable expiration date on copyright.

Think of all the great things open source has given us: Firefox for one, wikipedia another, youtube as a way for anyone to publish their video and get noticed among all of the illegally distributed videos that haven’t been ordered to be taken down (the infamous CNN clip of Jon Stewart telling off Tucker Carlson for example).  By freely distributing these, what was once a disposable medium (television) has become a way for us to connect again. 

No longer is there a 9 to 5 world where 40 million people watch the cosby show.  There is no cosby show equivelant.  The NBC Office was apparently saved from low ratings by iTunes and it’s on demand viewership, which is great.  Most of the people I know generally don’t watch tv, not because they wouldn’t like what’s on it, just because the medium has lost it’s grip on the public with it’s constant bombardment of advertising.  People flip or leave the room and do something else.  all of this dependancy on an 8 minute attention span is ruining the ability to formulate a thought or carry on a normal conversation.  Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but it is certainly time for a change.

As an example to throw out there, I’ll give you Orrin Hatch’s opponent, the only Dem willing to run, Pete Ashdown.  He’s got a blog and a myspace page.  He’s running an open source campaign as he’d like to call it.  And as far as I know, that’s his campaign. 

Check out ipaction.org for more info on these issues, how you can get involved in standing up for the consumer’s right as corporations (not corporate america, unless you would like to think of america as a global entity, in which case you can hardly judge american citizens of being above the law, but now I’m going off again) decide for us all how we are meant to view content that they own and control (bare in mind that the artists are working for those corporations and in most cases depend on them for funding; I believe it was Matthew Good who said that the Recording labels are just a bunch of loan sharks, granted he apparently owns and runs his own label...). 

Anyways, that’s as long of a sentence as I need to write today, I think I may be kinda completely done now, shunning the argument that DRM is good and necessary, not to mention helps stop piracy (which would only work if they managed to completely take control of the internet, not likely but if the ISPs and corporations have their way, we may not have much of a choice in the matter, thanks to your crummy election system and disenfranchised electorate. 

Like Nader said, if you’re not turned on to politics, politics will turn on you.  It’s got to be more than a popularity contest or all that matters will be who has the most money.

I went and did it again, didn’t I?