Hilary Rosen must be doing stand-up now .:. grubbykid.com

Hilary Rosen must be doing stand-up now

This is rich: Former Chair of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and All Around ~~Nice Person~~ Outdated Business Model Protectionist Hilary Rosen has an article on Ariana Huffington's new Blog, The Huffington Post entitled, Steve Jobs, Let my Music Go:

The new iPod my girlfriend gave me is a trap. Yeah, it is great looking and I really love the baby blue leather case but when, oh when, will Steve Jobs let me buy music from somewhere other than the Apple iTunes store and put it on my iPod?
...
But not the iPod. Most agree it is the best quality player on the market even if the cheapest one costs a few hundred dollars. The problem is that the iPod only works with either songs that you buy from the on-line Apple iTunes store or songs that you rip from your own CD’s. But those other music sites have lots of music that you can’t get at the iTunes store. So, if you have an iPod, you are out of luck. If you are really a geek, you can figure out how to strip the songs you might have bought from another on-line store of all identifying information so that they will go into the iPod. But then you have also degraded the sound quality. How cruel.

In a few words: what a bunch of crap.

Is she really claiming that the iPod locks music away, that there are actually credible competing online music stores available, and that they are competing with iTunes Music Store (iTMS) on the features and variety playfield? I wonder if she is on Napster's payroll, which would be irony at its best; because Napster has done a great job flushing millions of dollars in advertising down the toilet trying to woo iTunes Music Store users to switch to a subscription-based service. Or perhaps she is on Real Network's payroll - they tried this line of reasoning not one year ago - namely the argument that the iPod isn't playing fair. Including Microsoft in this equation, and all three have cried that the iPod is anticompetitive and anti-user.

Again, in a word: crap.

That isn't to say that there are not legitimate criticism of the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) and the iPod. Namely, that I can't move files off my iPod Shuffle to my two computers: one at work and one at home. That Apple redefines down terms of use for iTMS, with the upside of user losing features they paid for. That breaking the DRM on the iTMS-downloaded files in order to listen on a Linux/Unix machine is (most likely) a a Federal crime. That music selection could be better on iTMS. Those criticisms, among others, are legitimate areas of criticism which can be put forward. They are at least genually user-centric and are actual problems presented in a honest manner.

But this isn't what she talks about. This isn't what she talks about at all. Yes, Ms. Rosen glosses over a few of the user-centric criticisms I put forward above, but this isn't the reason she is writing this post. Her argument - if she had the intellectual honesty to put it forth - is that the iPod doesn't allow other forms of Digital Rights Management (DRM) to play on the iPod and that it should be forced, either by the market or by the State, to play other DRM music formats.

She says so as much here:

But keeping the iTunes system a proprietary technology to prevent anyone from using multiple (read Microsoft) music systems is the most anti-consumer and user unfriendly thing any god can do.

Listen: you can use different file formats; namely the near-universal file format called the mp3. You might have heard about that Ms. Rosen: you sued Napster, little girls, and little old ladies over the alleged downloading of mp3's. If Microsoft, Real Networks, Napster, et al want to get on board the online music store business there is an easy way to do this: let users buy music in mp3 format. Or sell compact discs. I guarantee your business will grow.

The extraneous part about being a geek and "strip the songs you might have bought from another on-line store of all identifying information so that they will go into the iPod" is both foolish and baffling at the same time. I'm not sure what this "identifying information so that they will go into the iPod" is all about; the only thing which comes to mind which Ms Rosen could be describing is the Hymn Project which strips iTMS encrypted AAC files into plain vanilla files. If anyone has an example of this "identifying information," I would like to know.

Comparing the inability of playing a Real Network's DRM file to the landmark Betamax case (Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. - 464 U.S. 417), which forms the basis (and meager) protections to use VCR's, TiVo's, and any other fair-use (and time-shifting) devices is either willfully misleading or ignorant. Ms. Rosen seems to be a smart lady - at least she didn't compare iTunes to the Boston Strangler like fellow Dutchboy at the Digital Dam, MPAA head Jack Valenti.

There are legitamate lines of criticism for iTunes, but cloaking arguments bandied about by Apple's chief competitors as criticism from users, when no one is making that criticism, strikes me as wishing to know who Ms. Rosen is consulting for. Crying that the restricted format du jour isn't available on the iPod strikes me as foolish. Especially when any old music store could use plain-vanilla mp3. In fact MP3tunes.com recently opened and are doing just that: selling DRM-free song files. See Ms. Rosen, the market does respond. Perhaps your old employers' should learn to change, too.

Hilary Rosen must be doing stand-up now

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