Apple Deleted Rivals’ Songs from Users’ iPods
m.wsj.com
m.wsj.com
So what happened is that I was living in Canada. I bought a bunch (maybe 30-50) songs directly from iTunes over the years. I had them on my iPad mini.
Later on, I was working and living in US, so I changed the country to US and added a US credit card to my iTunes account. Everything was fine.
Then, the iPad mini with Retina display (aka iPad mini 2) came out and I wanted to upgrade to it. Normally, I have nightly backups to iCloud, but since they are (unfortunately) not as thorough, I made a full local backup to my MacBook, and restored it on the new iPad mini with Retina. All the apps and settings transferred fine, but all songs were missing. When I went to "iTunes Song Purchases", it was empty, as it doesn't consider purchases I made in the Canadian iTunes Store as purchases.
I know that if I remembered/knew which songs I bought, I could buy them again and it might not charge me a 2nd time, but it's like playing russian roulette - you have to confirm a purchase and if it matches, you don't pay, else you do. Plus it's a lot of work to find/remember which songs I bought.
At first I was pretty unhappy about it and was gonna try to do something, but then I just gave up on it and moved on. It's not completely Apple's fault, because they have to deal with countries and having separate stores. I wish there was one global store and 1 country and 1 currency and I wouldn't have to deal with this just because I moved to new coordinates, but yeah.
At least there is for apps
It's a mess.
If rights are a problem (which seems unlikely, since I can still download it if I know what I purchased). Just give me the apps and music that they have licensed in both countries.
From parent:
> I know that if I remembered/knew which songs I bought, I could buy them again and it might not charge me a 2nd time
So if they don't charge you again, then what's the selling point for record companies?
The icing is that the mere existence of the complex, uncertain process insulates record companies from accusations that they're forcing people to re-buy music (as with the transition to CDs). Re-buying just happens to be the much more convenient option.
Steve Jobs may not have signed complex contracts. This does not exclude, that Apples layers make the customers sign complex contracts, does it?
Steve Jobs promoted the digital lifestyle, although he was a vinyl junkie and owned high-end audio stuff. The point is, that the advice he gave about the length of contracts is good, unimportant if he followed it or not. It is useful for customers to follow and that does certainly not exclude apples customers (although, nowadays, you may not be able to buy a slice of bread, if you insist on short terms and conditions).
Yeah, it's obnoxious as fuck. But it doesn't cost any more money.
Sounds like he made an effort to preserve his files. I know from personal experience how easy it is to mess something up with iTunes and lose all data. Like when the iOS 8 upgrade failed and the only way to unbrick the iPad was to reset it through iTunes.
Quite the opposite. I had the computer before the iPad mini, and all music is on it. In fact, it still has the music.
I did a full backup and restored on new iOS device, and this brought back everything (apps, settings, contacts, etc.) except the songs.
So either your music isn't in iTunes, or iTunes isn't set to sync music to your device.
How do you check software behaviour without using it and falling into the trap?
I agree that it is most likely a feature that music companies request. They usually don't allow sales and use under equal conditions everywhere (see youtube).
Read the source code. You shouldn't trust software that doesn't let you do that.
I certainly wasn't involved in the project, but it's easy to imagine a scenario where it's actually easier to do it this way. "Replace data" is an easier operation to implement than "merge."
I imagine the problems a one-world government would create far surpass any potential benefits you may have imagined.
It turned me off Windows as a mobile OS, but from what you're saying, it seems they've cleaned up their act now.
Edit: it seems they're still boneheaded with regards to the Xbox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8698610
That’s implementation-specific. Not necessarily a hypothetical one-world government must work like the government that’s running your country or mine.
Have you tried speaking with iTunes Support. They are very helpful and can sort out your missing purchases.
> It's not completely Apple's fault
It's not even remotely Apple's fault. Content licenses have always and likely will always be done country by country. And seriously 1 currency ?
Because Apple clearly indicates that your iTunes items are not bought, but rented for an undetermined time. It's right there, on page 17 in the small print of the EULA, in plain sight.
To be honest, it was easier for me to accept the loss and just move on. I don't listen to music that much anyway, and when I do, I can just stream from Spotify or YouTube.
Having moved from the UK to the US, I lost access to everything I'd purchased when I updated my billing details (no longer having a working UK credit card).
All Apple support could do was give me a list of the software/music I was missing, I presume to make re-purchasing easier.
No account merging, no transfer of purchase is a part of it. I found the easiest way has always been to keep multiple accounts and switch accounts when switching stores.
But when I say "easiest" it's more like "less horrible than all the other way you can get screwed" and you still have to so many battles to fight to have your content where you want.
But that does not help. Songs are gone, money may be gone, lots of work to do, legal action may be possible, but for a few songs? Why not take this as a warning, that a company will not take good care of our property? Apple did this before, a few years ago, btw. Microsoft even closed its music store (remember the Zune?), which resulted in total loss. Cloud stories will come. The only lesson that can be learned is, we shouldn't give up control over our property, certainly not to companies who benefit from our losses. However this is implemented.
Physical media for music is a way. The best sounding CDs from the early 80s cost cents only. Some even gain resale value (mfsl gold editions for example) as listeners with good taste realize, how crappy recent remasters sound.
When I commented a review of the Beatles vinyl mono editions recently, another guy (a grumpy old brit, for sure) replied: 'I spit on your digital downloads' :o). Maybe that's good advice (Although it would be interesting to understand, how he wants to spit on digitial data - it is not even physically available to spit on).
Right on!
I think it's probably good to ask, are things like this even property at all? And if so, whose property is it really?
I "bought" a movie on Vudu. It said "Buy this movie" right there on the screen. But what I really bought is a longer rental license than the normal "rent this movie" license.
If Vudu goes out of business, what do I own? Nothing. If I rage-quit Vudu, what do I own? Nothing. If the ultimate rights holder objects to the "sale," a la Amazon and 1984, what do I own? Nothing. (And I don't want compensation for the lost movie/book, I want the fucking item that I supposedly "purchased.") And I can't decide to sell my movie to someone else.
Like owning real estate, digital property is a bundle of rights. But with digital property, that bundle can probably be comfortably held between thumb and forefinger like a pinch of salt.
No, they didn't - the Zune music store is still around as Xbox Music, and any songs you bought via the Zune store will still be there (or mine are, anyway.) I believe you're thinking of PlaysForSure, which was not Zune related, but according to Wikipedia the closure of MSN Music did not result in total loss. Maybe there's some detail I'm missing?
That said, I agree with your larger point. All the music I care about is either physical or in DRM-free MP3 format and not synced to anyone's cloud or store.
If it's a bug, that's a suicidal testimony.
You could try looking at your billing history. It's frustrating to navigate, but I would be surprised if Apple flushed that too: http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT2727
Why would you pay for the songs when you could pirate them? Presumably because you want to conduct your activities legally.
I made the same experience moving to a different country and changing the "nationality" of my Apple ID. When contacting customer support about all my missing purchases, they said that this was standard procedure. It seems that Apple basically stores a country flag in your account, then everything you see and buy applies to that flag only. When you change country, you get a different "walled garden". You still somehow "own" all the content, you just can't see all of it. If you try to e.g. install an app you bought when registered in a different country Apple will give it to you for free stating that the purchase has been restored because you have already bought it. It still won't show up in the purchased items list.
I suspect if one were to switch back, it would go back and show all old purchases but not the recent ones from the last region. This seems to be their current implementation which they also seem happy with. It's really sorry state, because so many people move between countries these days and this is very unintuitive and causes a lot of annoyance.
It does show up once you have "purchased" it for free from the new store.
That music that you brought, you don't own it, as you also do not own those computers you are carrying on your pockets.
And just wait untill people start to really apply DRM to contracts and biling, the aplications it was conceived for.
If you're interested in this sort of behaviour, you might try Robert Cialdini's book, Influence, the Phychology of Persuasion (http://www.amazon.com/dp/006124189X/).
[Edit] I'm an idiot. I forgot that I wrote a post about this a while ago - here's a summary of Cialdini's (and related) stuff: https://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Entry.aspx?id=439dc4d5-33db-45a.... It's about influence, and to that end discusses some of our behavioural traits.
People rush to attack companies and find unlikely conspiratorial and malicious motivations for companies' actions too. I think the reality is that we're not all that logical. We're logical too, but logic is only part of how we form opinions. A lot of it is some sort of habit. If you see bourgeoisie conspiracy and class conflict as a driving force in the world, your version of events is likely to be whatever supports that. If you see corporate conspiracy everywhere… If you see governments accumulating power everywhere.. If you see a Google conspiracy everywhere..
But I tend to side with you. There's something offensive about the loyalty consumers have to big brands. The relationship just isn't mutual, which gives it an unsavory slavish flavor.
I don't know about you guys, but I'm struggling with this damned primate brain.
Political parties and loyalty to them tend to devolve into something fairly absurd. But, at least this is using the instinct for what it's meant to be used for. Making factions and tribes and getting your tribe into power. If the tribe Chiefdom is up for grabs, get your clan's main man the hat.
That's what this instinct is designed to do.
Loyalty to a brand of shoes or phone or whatever and developing a tribalism over that is a weird absurdity. With a prospective chief (or president) there is at least the theoretical possibility that your candidate represents your interests and gets your support that way. With brand loyalty, we can't even pretend that's possible. You're loyal to the brand because of an instinct being hijacked, for sure. It's like being loyal to a fictional character, being sad because a couple break up in a soap opera, or getting a mouse all excited with a pheromone soaked cue tip.
;)
It's just that we were talking about biases inherent in brand loyalty, beliefs, religion, political affiliations and world views.
yup. Here's one of the best explanations I've read to date about why those discussions usually are useless and result in yay/nay but nothing more: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html In short: when beliefs take over, reasoning steps aside.
What I've come to realize though is that to a certain extent, it seems futile to try and overcome tying things to our identity. I've often been accused of being overly analytical in everything I do (including things like relationships, which apparently you're not supposed to evaluate using statistics).
The problem is that my attempt to catch my own biases kind of drives me crazy in a way. I already have OCD, and all of my layers of meta-analysis toward my own arguments and viewpoints just ends up exhausting me. Add that to the fact that when I get in an "unwinnable" debate (you know the people; the ones who never give an inch) I just end up getting cranky and unhappy.
So while I do think this primitive, illogical, emotionally biased soup of a thinking machine we call a "brain" is far from optimal, I'm not sure if it's much better healthwise to attempt to force it into the other extreme.
No. Extremes are always bad - except in one case: me making this claim is also sort of an extreme. But the only good one, lol :]
For the rest: I think I know what you mean. I used to be self-analytical like that as well. Getting older though I found in the end it just made me unhappy because all this analysis (for me) led to mainly focussing on the bad points and ignoring all the good points. So now I'm easier on myself and instead of constantly trying to fix my whole self in one go I'm trying to do it rather gradually: firstly always try to do good and good only and secondly when I figure I'm not doing good (well, just admitting that and trying to fix it is already a good start and steps beyond what some ever achieve), or being way too biased, or wanting to kick people becasue they are being complete asholes, etc, etc, a short reflection going for example like 'ok, I'm too biased here, that's not so good, but it's also nothing to be ashamed of, just try better next time' or 'ok, the guys opinion clearly differs from yours and is possibly also completely wrong, but that does not mean he's a complete asshole. Better try to educate him instead of trying to kick his ass'. No idea if that makes sense to anyone but after some years of doing this I think I've actually become a better person. And definitely less unhappy. Nonetheless, sometimes I'll still be a complete ass myself mainly in online discussions. Working on it though :]
How it is being used in pg's Identity, I believe, is referring more to a Self-Concept (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-concept), or 'How one views one's self.' On the other, statements like "I've often been accused of being overly analytical" and "I already have OCD" refer more to Self-Knowledge, which the Self-Concept Wikipedia article suggests is distinct. The difference is in how we think about how things relate to ourselves, and is critical to what pg is saying.
For example, the article brings up an example in which a thread about programming degenerates into a religious-like war when programmers identify as a "X programmer". By incorporating X into their identity, or Self-Concept, they are saying 'X is part of who I am.' By incorporating X into their Self-Knowledge that would sound more like, 'X is something I know.'
The Self-Concept is dangerous because when someone else comes along and says something like "X sucks" the X-Programmer interprets it is "part of who I am sucks" as opposed to "something I know sucks." The latter is easy to dismiss (or discuss), but the former is personal and offensive.
pg warns that the more of these ideas we build into our Self-Concept the more exposed we become. By allowing more ideas into our Self-Concept we create new path ways for others to strike at our primitive, illogical, emotionally biased core. And its not that having that primitive core is bad, it's just that 'sophistication, logic, and rationalization' are slow and take a lot of energy. Presumable, that's why we have that primitive core, because people who try to rationalize threats to their well being are beaten, eaten, and humiliated; they can't react fast enough or keep it up long enough.
So don't try to hit the other extreme, you'll just wear yourself out. But be careful what you allow into your Self-Concept, because your Self-Concept isn't rational.
An easy way to convince yourself of something that is not rationally true is by evangelism: telling others that yes, this is the best way or greatest thing. The more you repeat it, the more you will believe it yourself.
This phenomenon is especially strong with something that people derive identity from, like religion or (especially for juveniles who have not yet developed a complete identity) psychological feelings of affiliation with subcultures revolving around a certain music genre or goods that project a certain lifestyle to others (designers goods like expensive hand bags, shoes or iPhones).
Attacking the brand feels like attacking them and they get defensive about it.
And yet, every time you look online, you see people talking about how horrible they are. People laugh at you for using Apple (or Google) products. A number of non-controversies about the company's products come up every year, just to give angry people another link to click on. And when the real controversies come up, all they do is reinforce people's established opinions. "How just like Apple (or Google). Fuck that company."
You don't want this stuff to become part of your identity, but in the end, your hand is kind of forced.
Whatever psychological mechanism it is, I'm sure these companies are abusing it (or would if they could).
I was reminded of this recently when I started seeing a lot of tweets along the lines of "Now that I've been using the iPhone 6 for a while, the iPhone 5 looks like a postage stamp. I can't go back to such a small screen"
Only a little while back these same people would ridicule large phones.
I think most companies would kill (figuratively) for that sort of audience.
Apparently, the same parts of the brain are triggered.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/gaming.gadgets/05/19/apple.reli...
"The neuroscientists ran a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) test on an Apple fanatic and discovered that images of the technology company's gadgets lit up the same parts of the brain as images of a deity do for religious people, the report says."
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/51/21533.full
Perhaps we're really describing the same mental faculty - conflation with brands, and religions, and political parties, are all just manipulations of the brain's habituated desire circuits, and to the person experiencing the "loyalty" just feel like being "true to oneself."
This may be a tautology.
In a world of spurious law suits and sensationalist headlines, it's a savvy person who doubts stories like this.
And in reality, this really does sound like a bug right now. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I don't see any point in deleting a users music this way. Apple doesn't have a problem implementing unpopular policies that irk it's customers. So why be cloak and dagger about this?
Think about what I just wrote, and tell me what does that say about the current state of the corporate world?
Everytime someone mentions this I cant help but recall the iphone that couldn't make phone calls unless you held it correctly.
As a side note the 6 feels great.
At least Apple learned from that one.
Equally, it's hard to see how their laptops could be considered anything less than good, whether OX is for you or not.
The keyboard is very specific to OS X and it's annoying to use under any other operating system. They don't build proper trackpad drivers for Windows or Linux last time I checked. They steer you directly towards the most expensive model if you're a professional because everything is soldered onto the motherboard.
You don't get a copy of Windows with it and if you're in business, you're going to need that as nobody in business really runs OS X (and that BYOD propaganda you're hearing about is just that - no IT department wants to infect their actual network with outside devices, so you'll most likely be stuck in some kind of DMZ without any real access.)
They're also stuck in the past. The Surface Pro is the future for mobile workers (but until Apple "invents" their version, I think most of the Apple apologists here on HN would probably disagree.)
>You don't get a copy of Windows with it and if you're in business, you're going to need that as nobody in business really runs OS X (and that BYOD propaganda you're hearing about is just that - no IT department wants to infect their actual network with outside devices, so you'll most likely be stuck in some kind of DMZ without any real access.)
This is utter nonsense though. I go to (way too many) professional conferences and I see way more Macs than I do Windows boxes and that's not even counting the Linux systems. This partly reflects the fact that I go to a lot of developer-centric events but even at a show like VMworld, you see at least as many Macs as Windows.
As for the lack of modularity, like it or not, it's increasingly the norm these days across most manufacturers. People like slim and light and modularity tends to work against those things.
I was just reacting to the statement that you must have Windows to be useful in business.
- 4K/5K desktop (the new iMac) that just works out of the box, without apps displaying tiny fonts
- TouchID on the iPhone 5S/6, a fingerprint login that actually works
- MacBook Pro unibody, including the trackpad precision
- MacBook Air
Try to come up with a similar list for HP, Dell or IBM. Maybe they do great work in the server space.
also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelism_marketing#History
Likening it to religion is likely not as far off as it first seems.
You'll see this happen pretty much anywhere. Politics? Far right wing nutjobs come out of the woodwork, angering far left nutjobs who come out of the woodwork to counteract the former. Ditto with military forces. Rebels/terrorists come out of the woodwork, suddenly extreme force (e.g. aerial bombardment, rendition, etc) is A-OK to cancel them out. Religious fanatics come out of the woodwork, and then the atheist fanatics come out of the woodwork.
The middle pretty much ignores the fringes until the battle actually affects them. Then everyone's coming out of the woodwork.
This is where marketing tries to be.
My music collection is synced to Dropbox and automatically syncs across all my PCs and to my phone.
I've also come to enjoy walking into music stores and browsing the music looking for something that I'll enjoy coding to, and a lot of the time here in Australia it ends up being cheaper buying physical CDs nowadays, especially if you're not buying the latest stuff.
There's more than just convenience.
The CD or DVD just takes all that pain away.
I used to buy and rip CDs but it takes time and space and feels really backward.
All of this is very subjective. Your points are well made, nonetheless.
I can see problems happening with the Amazon Player (I never used it), but CDs don't help with that.
Also, I'm constrained by the encoding Amazon gives me.
I like your approach: pick the best thing in each category and use them together. A dumb TV with a good picture, getting video from a video input source of my choosing. An ebook in a standard format, read on whatever I want to use.
The short-term convenience that a "complete ecosystem" provides is often a giant pain the long run.
Plus, to take the songs from you, they'd have to break into my house and walk away with all my CDs.
I also have interesting sleeve notes and details on who mixed the album and the equipment they endorse, as well as photos and beautiful smelling paper in the sleeves.
Great!
External / USB DVD drive, or an USB stick, or Dropbox, or Mega, or some other service like that.
The external DVD drive offered by Apple seems prohibitively expensive for what it is; also, carrying an external drive around to save just a few millimetres on MacBook height seems stupid to me.
And to reply to the usual criticism in advance: No I don't hear the difference between 320kbit MP3 and lossless, but I want to be future proof for the time some advanced codec like Opus finally takes over. For some reasons, storage space on portable players has stopped to grow at the 8 or 16GB mark, while SD cards go well into 128GB by now (with affordable prices). Thus, like 8 years ago, a factor of 2 or 3 in the compression ratio still makes the difference between me carefully having to choose which of my music I want to copy on my player or just dumping the whole library on it.
A very revealing statement about the way Apple perceives its users. Shut up, pay, and don't ask questions.
As somebody who has had to do tech support, I fully understand the desire to provide the users with less information. Believe me, most of them confuse easily.
Most of the time this is because they have better things to do.
When it comes to documentation: if the implementation details are not important to the user, you should skip them. Words on a page that a user reads but doesn't care about is wasting their time and they could be reading about other important details.
If you have a broad user base who largely don't care about implementation details you're better hiding them from everyone rather than showing them to everyone.
EDIT: For that matter, how do you KNOW that the ISP did indeed terminate your large encrypted file transfer?
Little to none, but this is by design. If they had made such a decision, tracing it to them is difficult. Easier to tell the phone reps nothing and push the blame onto either end of the transfer rather than on the path in-between. How many people will pursue this past just venting about it on the Internet?
> For that matter, how do you KNOW that the ISP did indeed terminate your large encrypted file transfer?
If it's a single transfer, then you really can't. That said, you can establish a pattern. For example, if your connections always terminate around the 20-minute mark and this happens regardless of the other end of the connection (or the network path to that end-point), you could make a compelling case that it's the ISP's fault at the very least.
I always admired the technology and integration in Apple gear, but since the days of MacOS system software I have always hated the dumbed-down, hard-to-customize operating system, and have never purchased an Apple product. I'm going to have to pick up an iPad at some point because there are so many good apps aimed at Musicians, and I respect the fact that OS X is basically BSD in gift wrap so I can get to a command line if I really want to know what's going on. But I don't feel that enthusiastic about it, because I think there's something fundamentally user-hostile about obfuscating what's going on behind the curtain.
Unfortunately it is rather opinionated and you do have to do things 'the mac way', but if you live in a Terminal having copy on a different key to interrupt is amazingly useful. Also having windows auto-restore when plugging in an external monitor, I only just learnt that Windows doesn't do this.
As for errors, almost everything is logged in some way, but again it's hidden from regular users.
I started out as a BSD guy, who transitioned as the *nix desktop got better to gnu/linux. The more I learned about the differences between gpl/bsd and the more I thought about the philosophical underpinnings, the more I am convinced that Richard Stallman, while eccentric and sometimes hard to bear for some, was and is a man ahead of his time, and that he is absolutely right when he talks about the four freedoms.
Despite this, at my recent new position, I gave in and decided to dive into the apple ecosystem because "spend less time fixing your system and more time working!" was what I kept getting told. I also have apple users so the ability to support them is important.
That being said, I have been increasingly dissatisfied with the whole system, both in it's functionality and its philosophy. (which is a whole post within itself)
I'm about ready to scrap it all and return to something I have more control over.
The bottom line is this: If you don't have root on your device, you don't own it. (iPhone, iPod, iPad, Android phone, Windows phone, Smart TV's, gaming consoles, we are increasingly surrounded by devices we don't have control over. I was listening to a talk about why bsd is a better ecosystem, and it is, in many ways, and the presenter said something that really struck me. He said, paraphrasing, "...and we recently found out [whichever]bsd is in the playstation 4." He said it in a way that was supposed to be impressive, as in "hey look, our shit is so awesome and business friendly that it got put on the new playstation!" An audience member then said something along the lines of, "is the source code released?" And of course the speaker had to mumble "no" and move on quickly.
It's the epitome of the problem. BSD licensing enables companies to restrict the freedom of the user, full stop.
I truly believe GPL is just getting started in the future of science, technology, and communication.
Did Itunes used to work differently?
My assumption would be that they somehow determined if a song or album came from another media service through, for example:
- Some file metadata (somehow). - Or perhaps by looking at what programs you had installed on your PC.
Apple DID let you sync raw MP3 and other non-DRM files, but only through iTunes.
Apple did not delete those to my knowledge, but it sounds like the allegation is that Apple deleted DRM'd files that were side-loaded through other programs like DVD Jon's Doubletwist.
It worked then exactly the same way as it does now[1].
You couldn't sync songs on the device back into iTunes though[2] - if you had it in manual, put some songs on it (from another iTunes library, a third party app or anywhere else) and then tried to sync it with your iTunes, it would remove everything on there before syncing over your iTunes library.
1: http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201593 2: Without one of many third-party helper apps. Sentuti was a lifesaver!
I believe this refers to the case going on right now [1] where RealPlayer Music that was sold in '05 or so as 'iPod Compatible' was locked out more than once by iTunes updates.
The thing is it worked (like PlayFair before it [2]) by circumventing/faking FairPlay, which was/is quite likely a violation of the DMCA. Apple patched the bugs and thus "excluded competitors".
So because Apple "excluded competitors" (who where breaking their encryption) they artificially keep the price of music high by stifling competition (ignoring record company contracts and the fact that Real had a 3% market share at the time).
You're right thought. Throughout the entire life of the iPod you've been able to play DRM free MP3s that you got through any method, legal or otherwise.
Don't forget, Real didn't have a good reputation. And they were breaking Apple's DRM so you could play files that had their DRM so it's the "they were fighting for people's freedom" card isn't very strong.
I see this as the same as when Palm faked USB IDs so the Pre would sync with iTunes. Someone else hacked their way into taking advantage of Apple's software and then got mad when the hack was removed and claimed "unfair competition". Sour grapes.
[1] http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/12/03/steve-jobs-video-t...
Copyright law covers copying itself.
So if you bypass some encryption to copy something, we have to look at two different areas of law, one for the bypassing, one for the copying.
Fair use provides some exemptions to the copying.
DMCA exemptions are promulgated by the Library of Congress, developed in consultation with the Copyright Office and after public notice and comment periods, and updated every three years. DMCA exemptions are not automatically renewed, so the exemptions can change radically every three years.
Public comments have frequently requested a catchall fair use exemption to the DMCA, ie, if the anti-circumvention tech was bypassed only in service of a fair use of a work, then there should be no violation of the DMCA.
Such an exemption has been rejected so far, but could be adopted at some point in the future.
"Further, we conclude that the exemption proceeding is constructed not to protect noninfringing users, but to limit courts' ability to exonerate them via the traditional defenses to copyright infringement."
1. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/07/court-...
In simple terms, imagine a box with a padlock on it. The DMCA says, roughly:
* You're not allowed to examine the lock to figure out how to make a key for it.
* You're not allowed to make a key for the lock.
* If you somehow get a key for the lock, you're not allowed to use it.
* If you somehow get a key for the lock, you're not allowed to give it to anyone else.
* If you somehow get a key for the lock, you're not allowed to tell anyone else information about it that might let them make their own key.
The MGE case tried to claim, basically, that once someone else has already unlocked the box, it would be a DMCA violation to look inside. And the court of appeals just said "no, that's not something the DMCA forbids" while leaving all the other bits (you're not allowed to have/make/distribute/etc. the key) in place.
How convenient that Apple chose a security solution that just happened to give them an unfair advantage over their competition. Quite the happy coincidence there.
However I'd argue it's a fair advantage. Apple are not obliged to make competitors' DRM work with their devices.
I think I started doing this shortly after Amazon got into a minor shitstorm for remotely deleting copies of 1984 (of all books!) from Kindle devices. News like this makes me happy that I've been doing what I've been doing.
Requiem was a drm stripper for itunes music and videos. It was a clear that apple figured out what was going on and made software updates to break it. Once apple beat it for good I stopped buying videos (and pretty much stopped watching tv).
Now music is DRM free. Video, saddly is not.
I tend to purchase most songs while in my car (after hearing it on Pandora/Sirius) and don't know if it would even be possible to purchase and play immediately a track purchased from Amazon on an iOS device (without a computer).
In fact, I can stream/download music from CDs and vinyl I bought years ago through Amazon.
Bandcamp seems to be doing about the right thing, actually. It allows to keep the interaction between artist and listener reasonably personal, while at the same time offering options to make the process easier and more streamlined from artist’s perspective. It also is very transparent about their fees—you know your money will go directly to the artist (though I’m not totally sure how it works with labels, for them Bandcamp seems to offer a separate kind of account).
"Farrugia told the court that hackers with names like “DVD Jon” and “Requiem” made Apple “very paranoid” about protecting iTunes. Updates that deleted non-Apple music files were intended to protect consumers from those system break-ins. “The system was totally hacked,” he said."
Is he stating that the iPhone OS (was it called iOS back then?) was completely hacked, or that the work-around to get music onto an iPod outside of iTunes was "hacked"? I'm assuming the former, just curious on the background there.
I think this might be a situation where Apple being first-mover has been a disadvantage to them; they started with a "sync to one single computer" design, and have been patching on that over and over to move into the new ecosystems. The other options in the market started with a "sync to cloud" design, so they had to solve issues of merging and collating data from multiple devices out of the starting gate.
Also, when Android started, music was only sold without DRM. And incompatible flavors of DRM is what this whole thing is about. Windows Phone was around then, but I don't know much about music on it.
Deleting DRMed media files and system software somehow solves system intrusions? That's rich. Pretty clear who the bad guys are here.
Your second problem: you expected a bad actor to suddenly be good.
Your third problem. You kept buying Apple because it's 'shiny'.
Guess you should have listened to Stallman. He may be a nut, but he does call it right.
His calls are amazingly far-reaching. But yes, he can call 'em. The trouble is, his Al Gore beats his delivery. They both gotta up their PR game.
I work in Emergent technology/ R&D at a university, and we get questions like "what can I buy that will just work"? I look towards Free Software, and what is published. If there's a free software solution for it, it'll never go away. However, if there's a loose corporate control, then it probably will fade. But if there's iron-grip control, the device will go away as soon as something shiner comes out to take its place.
That last one is Apple.
The official way to upload Songs in the Ipod-Iphone is using Itunes. I have uploaded myself lots of music purchased on other services or my own into Itunes without a problem.
It will be a problem if Itunes restricted the music it loads in the devices, like the misleading tittle implies, and like other devices did(and are History now),it does not.
I have also uploaded music from Linux programs, caring not to update the firmware of the device over the supported ones, but I would not have made a drama if it were not to work.
edit: Those downvoting seem to be seriously hostile towards consumers. If people are giving you 700 dollar profits per sale, I think you should be a lot more upfront about your limitations. Hiding a disclaimer in fine print on a support page is just plain wrong.
Secondly, yah, that's true, if you only use one computer. If you're like any one of the millions of people who use more than one computer, the second you plug your iPhone/iTouch into a different computer, the only options you're given are to 1) Eject or 2) Erase.
Considering what I spent on the iPhone, I should be able to do whatever I please, but that's clearly not the case.
While I'm sure a small portion of the population has more than computer, I don't see why you'd need to sync your music on more than one. All the other data can be sync'd through iCloud (contacts, etc).
Do you also see why that restriction might be in place? They don't want to let people plug it into anyone's computer and "share" all that music.
I suppose with iCloud Drive now part of OSX you can just sync keep your music or iTunes folder in there and sync that.
I didn't pay for a license, I paid for the device itself, far more than it costs them to Manufacture. BTW, the FTC and FCC stand by that fact every time they issue an injunction forcing carriers to unlock out of contract.
Small portion? Seriously? in 2013 there were more than 500 MILLION internet connected devices in the US alone[1], spread out among 117 million households[2], but that's a small portion?
[1]https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
[2]http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/03/18/npd-us-homes-now-ho...
You have the means to sync and copy your music yourself around your own devices, there's nothing preventing you from doing that and as I mentioned it's getting easier with things like iCloud Drive now.
I'm honestly curious as to why you feel the need to treat consumers/customers like trash? I'm supposed to pay extra for iCloud drive because...reasons?
Why is your opinion that anyone who does things differently than you wrong? Because that's what you and everyone else here has said.
Apple is not a SaaS, IaaS, or PaaS. They produce tangible goods that consumers own. Outside of violating state or federal laws, including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, you are legally entitled to do whatever you so choose with your property.
Why is everyone okay with Apple dictating what you can or can't do with your property? You paid for it, and not just for a license. It is YOURS, why are you giving up your rights?
If Microsoft only allowed you to sync one Email account in Windows, would you still go "well, I don't know why you'd need multiple accounts, you're stupid if you do".
Does everyone here tell their customers "tough luck, I guess try to get around that "feature"'?
The only reason apple does this is because they sell music. If they didn't, there would be absolutely no incentive to put these types of constraint on a consumer device.
At least, that's how I think we slouch.
It is (very marginally) more hassle to buy them from Amazon and then drag them into iTunes, but hey, it feels good to fight The Man. (Plus, albums are often $2 or $3 cheaper on Amazon than in the Apple music store.)
EDIT: history of the DRM-free Amazon Music store: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Music
I love how people on HN blatantly just say "untrue". Really? I don't recall you being present during these experiences.
Maybe you want to reword that to "Glad I paid 930 dollars for a device that can only sync music from one of my computers but sync all the rest of my data across as many devices as I want".
Maybe I should reword my comment to be "Glad I paid 930 dollars for a device that can only do what Apple's Business Analysts think is acceptable."
There are two ways to set up an iOS device. One is to have it sync to a computer. This is what you have done. Yes, it's set to sync to a particular computer, and you can change that computer—but with this setup, the contents of the iOS device are just a copy of what's on the computer, so if you change the computer, it replaces the files on the device. Generally, it's not a great way to go, it's mostly a holdover from early iPod days. Second is to not have it sync to a computer. If you have more than one computer—or no computers with iTunes, this is a better idea. Honestly, there isn't really a good reason to plug the devices into a computer any more, except to charge.
> I love how people on HN blatantly just say "untrue". Really? I don't recall you being present during these experiences.
Why would we need to be present during for your experiences? We've all had our own experiences, where we've done what you claim is impossible.
iPhone can only add music or video from a single iTunes Library.
If you set your device properly, which you are incapable of, you will not see that message and hence the cause does not apply to you.
2. If you're going to insult me, learn to count and learn directions, The bullet points your referring to are below and there are only 3 of them
> Read above that, it is one of the probable conditions, "If you see a message that your device is synced with another library." There are 4 other probable causes for that message mentioned there.
However, that's not what you claimed. What you claimed was:
> a device I can only use with music from their store from one computer
You can use music from many music stores, or none at all if you rip your own from CDs. And you can connect to many computers, if your device isn't set to sync with a particular library.
Besides the technical issues it would be a complete user interface nightmare when dealing with storage issues on the device.
There are a lot of different streaming music services available too(not to mention you can stream your itunes purchases too.) If you are manually managing your music where you expect songs to magically move from one computer to another through an iphone you might consider finding a different solution than complaining that apple doesn't magically solve your problem.
Not all of them came from the same computer, either. They were added to my iTunes library over the years from several Macs and PCs. Some were ripped from CDs, some were purchased from other stores (Amazon, eMusic, Bandcamp) and some were downloaded from filesharing services.
I don't think you're lying. It seems like the root of your problem is that you selected "manually manage music and videos," but to be honest I'm not sure, because the defaults have worked well for me across quite a few computers and portable devices.
The gist of your argument seems to be that Apple makes you go through hoops to use non-iTunes music by default.
In reality, it works really well by default, and it seems like you jumped through some hoops to screw it up.
There are just lots of Apple fanbois on HN, nothing more than that.