The Economist, DVD Jon On Apple's DRM Stand 425
We have two followups this morning to Tuesday's story on Steve Jobs's call to do away with DRM for music. The first is an editorial in The Economist sent in by reader redelm, who notes that as "arguably the world's leading business newspaper/magazine" that publication is in a position to influence legal and political decision-makers who may never have heard of DRM. The Economist says: "Mr Jobs's argument, in short, is transparently self-serving. It also happens to be right." Next, Whiney Mac Fanboy sends pointers to two blog entries by "DVD Jon" Johansen. In the first Johansen questions Jobs's misuse of statistics in attempting to prove that consumers aren't tied to iPods through ITMS: "Many iPod owners have never bought anything from the iTunes Store. Some have bought hundreds of songs. Some have bought thousands. At the 2004 Macworld Expo, Steve revealed that one customer had bought $29,500 worth of music." Johansen's second post questions Jobs's "DRM-free in a heartbeat" claim: "There are... many Indie artists who would love to sell DRM-free music on iTunes, but Apple will not allow them... It should not take Apple's iTunes team more than 2-3 days to implement a solution for not wrapping content with FairPlay when the content owner does not mandate DRM. This could be done in a completely transparent way and would not be confusing to the users."
Update: 02/08 16:28 GMT by KD : Added missing links.
Update: 02/08 16:28 GMT by KD : Added missing links.
That link again ... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.economist.com/daily/news/displaystory.
Re:Law of Averages (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Law of Averages (Score:4, Informative)
Also, DVD Jon was pointing out that Jobs's iPod figure reflected all iPods sold, not all that are functional or in use (a number that no one knows). People have been replacing iPods as they break, and have been upgrading as new ones get released. Additionally, music might be on more than one iPod, as a family might authorize everyone's computers to play everyone else's music, so that Bro and Sis can share songs on their iPods.
Re:Law of Averages (Score:5, Informative)
He knows what average means, and he knows that Steve was specifically referring to the arithmetic mean, because 20 billion songs/ 90 million ipods is the ~22 songs/ipod in question.
He's just saying that using this figure is misleading. Like talking about average fuel economy by dividing all the car miles ever by total gasoline production for the last 110 years. Sure it's the average, but it doesn't really tell you anything about current mileage. Most of those cars are scrap by now, just like many of the ipods sold in the last few years.
Re:Law of Averages (Score:3, Informative)
The 22 per ipod is the mean - often the most useful and the one that is frequently implies with the more ambiguous word "average" however in this case its the most useless.
The mode usually requires wider boundries than single elements to be useful (eg 0, 1-5, 6-10, etc) but I would tend to say that the mode or perhaps the median would be the more useful average when tailoring a service to your main user base.
Despite these figures not being announced you can bet that apple have them and almost certainly use them internally - they probably just dont sound as good to the average non mathematical person
Re:Confusion free? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Confusion free? (Score:3, Informative)
Right clicking and choosing 'Convert to mp3' gives you a pop up telling you you can't convert purchased songs.
Here Here! Cheers DVD Jon (Score:3, Informative)
i haven't bought a cd since 1999 (Score:3, Informative)
since 1999, my musical tastes have grown eclectic, and my musical collection has grown huge and varied and rich
what piracy has enabled me to do is to "grow up" outside of american pop music and embrace music from the world. to download trance music from the netherlands, bhangra from india, soca from trinidad, wierd love ballads from japan, and strange slow ditties from the philippines
the existence of the rich esoterica easy at my fingertips would have been impossible in a world of music conglomerate tolls
in other words, i do have a valid argument for music piracy, simply because i don't download lindsey lohan or justin timberlake, so before you rail at me for stealing form starving third world artists:
if it weren't for piracy, i would never have been exposed to the artists i am listening too in the first place
it's a catch-22 position: i couldn't "steal" from the artists i listen to if piracy (via looking at the musical collections of others who have a track or two that i like) didn't exist
music piracy is the best thing that has ever happened to my musical tastes and my musical experience. it expanded my mind. and i'm not stealing from anyone. i am an audience for the artists i listen to that wouldn't exist in a world where priacy didn't exist
Re:A Major Injustice (Score:2, Informative)
As to your observation of us having a very limited selection, this is partly deliberate, partly (as just pointed out) territorial, and partly (as my original posting stated) a symptom of major label DRM:
a) we consider a limited selection is not negative, it is positive - we do not sell label content for the sake of volume stats - our customers shop with us appreciating 'less is more', in that a multiplicity of choice is overwhelming and our recommendation authority helps edit toward a focus on the most interesting titles - we have a widely acknowledged status of being one of the world's greatest record stores as a result - google us to see;
b) being a UK-based retailer, we don't have US rights on some label content;
c) DRM prevents us from retailing the major label product offer as found in our London stores and mail-order website.
I hope that helps explain.
Re:Indie Music (Score:3, Informative)
How do they do it now? 30% of the music on iTunes right now is from indie labels.
The problem isn't indie labels can't sell on iTunes, it's that they can't sell on iTunes without DRM. Apple requires DRM for everyone.. Apple, not the labels.
DVD Jon would love this (Score:3, Informative)
Just how long do you think it would take him (or someone just like him) to sniff out the flag and insert a filter to turn it off for all downloads by default. Answer: not long at all.
I'm sure that DVD Jon knows this fully well, so his "encouragement" to Apple is completely self serving. It has to be all or nothing, or hackers like DJ will rip the floor out from underneath them.