Philip Schiller, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing at Apple Inc.
Having originally been a music composition major, this hits home. Apple said Tuesday it will be lifting it's anticopying restrictions known as Digital Rights management on all of the songs sold in its iTunes store. Meaning, no more copying restrictions give people the ability to freely shift songs they buy on iTunes without any worries.
The New York Times writes, "Technologically sophisticated fans of digital music complain that D.R.M. imposes unfair restrictions on what they can do with the tracks they have bought. For example, the protected files from iTunes do not work on portable players made by companies other than Apple.
"I think the writing was on the wall, both for Apple and the labels, that basically consumers were not going to put up with D.R.M. anymore," said Tim Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies, a market research company."
Finally! So you mean I can actually exercise my Fair Use rights and make a personal copy of a song I already purchased??? Amen.
While we think forcing consumers "to pay a one-time fee to strip copying restrictions from music they have already bought on iTunes" is lame, we applaud the music studios' getting with the times and moving away from their obsession with D.R.M.
Of course, this move comes after years and years of the music industry's continuously losing money. At least they seem to be learning the lesson of the Marines, to "adapt and overcome." Seriously, the old days were good, but sometimes you've got to quit acting like a dinosaur – and "live in the now."
This also got me thinking…If only the movie industry were ready to accept that times have changed as well. Sadly, they refuse to get with the program. As this RedState post notes, a software product called RealDVD would allow folks to back up DVDs the same way you back up your music CDs onto your computer with iTunes (or some other utility), and watch your movies where you want, when you want - yet the movie industry won't allow consumers to use it.
And so another archaic industry crumbles because they fail to embrace technology and the world we live in…though the emergence of iRecord as written about on ZDNet today gives me hope that RealDVD will eventually see the light of day…
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