Wednesday, June 6, 2007
iTunes watermarks
For those of you who follow such things, you may have noticed that Apple is selling DRM-free songs on iTunes in response to the widespread hatred of DRM in general (widespread could be exaggeration, but I do certainly have a passionate hatred for it). It has come to be known that these new songs have a "watermark" that contains the buyer's username and email (or some similar identification, not sure on specifics) within the file itself so that a song file can easily identify the original purchaser. There has been some outcry over this watermark from some folks, but I think it really isn't that bad. Now I hate DRM more than most folks, but even I have to say that a watermark is 100 times better than the old DRM crap. If I buy a song on iTunes with this watermark, I can play it on any music player I own with no restrictions; I'm no longer paying for the right to play a song on one (or a very few) players, but the right to play a song on whatever the heck I want. The only possible downside (aside from the 30 cent extra cost on iTunes) is that I can't share my songs on bittorrent, and there really isn't ever a legitimate reason to do that in the first place. So I for one am much more happy with watermarks.
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1 comment:
watermarks are an improvement, but a small improvement at best.
privacy, it would seem, is a thing of the past.
also, is there a legitimate reason why in a capitalist society that it is impossible to legally buy music that does not have a watermark?
i guess the right of the seller to sell something that can't be resold is more important than the buyer's right to buy something that has resale value.
there's middlemen for everything else...why can't there be middlemen for music? what gives I-Tunes and a few others the right to have a business that i can't have? and if i wanted to compete with them by selling music that is not drm'd and not watermarked, why can't i do that? i think people would buy more music from such a store than would buy from i-tunes, but would i ever be allowed to sell music that way? even music by artists who don't really care if they make money off of internet song sales because they make most of their money off concert appearances anyway? i mean, wtf?
ok, i think i finally expressed outrage. all i was goin for.
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