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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

You can pay $25 a year for ITunes Match - once - and get all of your music that you ever bought DRM free.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204146

Movies have DRM. Blame that on the studios But Apple, Amazon, Google, Vudu and a couple of the other digital movie services participate in Movies Anywhere with most of the studios. You buy a movie from one place and it is automatically considered purchased from the other stores.

Movies have always had copy protection - even back in the analog days with Macrovision.

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Music was supposed to be copy-protected, too: the RIAA fought tooth and nail to kill Digital Audio Tape, and then settled for the AHRA which mandated all "consumer" digital recorders have DRM in them. The problem was that this was legally ineffective[0] once PCs got CD drives and enough storage and processing power to deal with the firehose that was CD-DA. Insisting on DRM for legal music downloads was their way of putting the genie back in the bottle, but that also gave Apple a monopsony over all digital music, much like the App Store does for iOS software today. Going DRM-free let the labels sideload MP3s onto people's iPods and cut Apple out of the equation. But they would have never agreed to do it if Apple was willing to license FairPlay on FRAND terms like Microsoft did with PlaysForSure.

More generally, consumer copying technology was never really "supposed" to exist. It's often been said that "copyright was supposed to regulate publishers, not consumers", which I agree with. But the flipside of this was "consumers weren't supposed to become casual publishers", which is what the AHRA, DMCA 1201, and DRM as a whole was/is trying to achieve. But that's largely failed, and we live in the world where everyone is a publisher all the time, which is why everyone has to be regulated like a publisher all the time.

[0] See RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia

Let’s not skip over the fact that Jobs himself publicly encouraged the music industry to license their music DRM free.

This was originally posted on the front page of Apple back in 2007.

https://macdailynews.com/2007/02/06/apple_ceo_steve_jobs_pos...

It's kind of funny, because at the same time Jobs is explaining why DRM sucks and basically can't be standardized, they were also developing the iPhone which would go on to repeat the whole "only we sell things wrapped in this DRM" thing... except without the sideloading option.

The article you linked adds it's own commentary which has aged like milk. Jobs wasn't so much opposed to DRM in general, as much as he just didn't like it on music. This probably has more to do with the fact that Apple was not a music label[0], and thus he was predisposed to look at music solely as a consumer[1]. When it comes to things Apple does publish[2], such as software, they are extremely protective of it.

[0] And legally, cannot, because of numerous trademark lawsuits with Apple Records, the record label of The Beatles

[1] "They don't want to rent their music" https://www.theverge.com/2015/6/8/8744963/steve-jobs-jesus-p...

[2] "Publishing" in this case means funding the creation, marketing, and physical manufacturing of some creative work. This is primarily what a music label does, and is part of the reason why they take so much from artists.

The market changes as far as your second foot note. No one has ever made a successful business with subscription music. By “successful” I mean “decently profitable”.

Spotify makes around $3 million a quarter in profit.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/spotify-has-finally-found-a...

Movies Anywhere should be called Movies Anywhere So Long As It's in the U.S. It doesn't exist anywhere else. What's more annoying is Movies Anywhere seems to have led to the demise of Ultraviolet which actually existed outside the U.S so digital codes are even worse than they used to be where I live or not existent.

Been using iTunes Match for many many years but honestly you can tell it's not getting attention anymore. Very glitchy these days with playback you can't scrub sometimes or just skipping tracks for no reason, struggling to sync tracks up to it sometimes.

Also you can't turn off the Apple Music ads anymore, or at least the setting claiming to turn them off just resets itself after a few hours.

I don't think Macrovision was universal though, based on my personal experience as a kid.

Back in the day, it wasn't.

As of 1998 and the DMCA, it is a federal crime in the USA to sell a VCR without Macrovision.

The commercial tapes for the most part had Macrovision. The VCRs had a built in “circumvention device”.

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