While iTunes are opening stores all over the world and contributing to the downloading of music from the internet for a small fee, they are also limiting the use of the downloaded files by usind Digital Rights Management (DRM)
“DRM systems restrict the use of digital files in order to protect the interests of copyright holders. DRM technologies can control file access (number of views, length of views), altering, sharing, copying, printing, and saving. These technologies may be contained within the operating system, program software, or in the actual hardware of a device.”quote from www.epic.org
When you download a file from iTunes online store and store it in your iTunes program on your computer it will become a DRM file, and that means that you can only play your file in your iTunes player or you iPod. The file is not a DRM file when you download it, but becomes one when you put it in your iTune. So you may say that you don’t have to put in iTunes, but the music you download from iTunes online store is not mp3 it’s acc which only works on iTunes…
The Apple webpage have renamed DRM to FairPlay and tell us:
“The iTunes Music Store uses FairPlay, Apple’s digital rights management system that’s designed to be fair to the artist, to the record companies and to you. In a nutshell, your FairPlay agreement entitles you to play your music on up to five computers (and enjoy unlimited synching with iPods), allows unlimited burning for individual songs and lets you burn playlists up to 7 times each. ”
But the DRM isn’t FairPlay as apple claims;
“DRM Systems Cannot Recognize Fair Use Rights
Statutory and Common Law interpretations of copyright law afford individuals “Fair Use” rights. Fair Use provides a defense to individuals who engage in an unauthorized use of protected content. It is impossible for DRM systems to incorporate Fair Use principles because they are difficult to define, and evolve over time. Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation has argued that for DRM to recognize Fair Use, engineers must be able to program a federal judge onto a computer chip.
Fair Use allows individuals to interact with content to promote cultural production, learning, innovation, and equity between content owners and consumers. Fair Use includes libraries’ and educators’ rights to provide content to users, the right to sell physical copies of certain content that one acquires lawfully (the “First Sale” doctrine), and the ability to make a backup copy of software and music. No DRM scheme developed affords users these rights. “quote from www.epic.org
People that are Mac lovers, would probably not have a problem with this. However, I as a neutral in the war between PC and Mac don’t like it at all. I think that DRM is more damaging than it is protecting it’s content. Richard Stallman has discribed the horror that may be our future if Apple and DRM are allowed to contiune develop their copyright systems;
“For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in college–when Lissa Lenz asked to borrow his computer. Hers had broken down, and unless she could borrow another, she would fail her midterm project. There was no one she dared ask, except Dan.
This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her–but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong–something that only pirates would do.” from the book The Right to read.
