While I love my Nano, and I enjoy using iTunes, the one thing that cheeses me off are the hoops I have to jump through to play iTunes music I’ve legally purchased on non-Apple products. For example, I recently purchased the entire first season of “The Ricky Gervais Show” podcasts from Audible (cos I’m a latecomer, which is defined in weeks anymore), and I had to waste 6 CDs converting it to .mp3. WTF? That ain’t right.
So it totally cracks me up when Apple calls the French attempt at forcing them to open up their FairPlay technology “State-sponsored piracy.” Perhaps the French are just sick of wasting all of those CDs.
“The French implementation of the EU Copyright Directive will result in state-sponsored piracy,” Apple said in a statement. “If this happens, legal music sales will plummet just when legitimate alternatives to piracy are winning over customers. iPod sales will likely increase as users freely load their iPods with ‘interoperable’ music which cannot be adequately protected. Free movies for iPods should not be far behind in what will rapidly become a state-sponsored culture of piracy.”
Hee. That’s at great bit of overheated rhetoric, and it brings up images of the French parliament — led by Johnny Depp, of course — boarding ships, ripping open boxes of iPods while slamming Bordeaux straight from the bottle and distributing the iPods to their constituents, who are waiting onshore and cheering.
I’ll leave the analysis from the DRM standpoint to Kirk; I just want to be able to play the music I’ve purchased wherever and whenever I want. “Interoperable” seems like a good thing. Which is one of the reasons I’ve just become an emusic subscriber.