An eight-person jury has decided that Apple is not on the hook for what could have been more than $1 billion in a trial centering on extra security measures the company added to iTunes and iPods starting in 2006.
Delivering a unanimous verdict today, the group said Apple’s iTunes 7.0, released in the fall of 2006, was a “genuine product improvement,” meaning that new features (though importantly increased security) were good for consumers. Plaintiffs in the case unsuccessfully argued that those features not only thwarted competition, but also made Apple’s products less useful since customers could not as easily use purchased music or jukebox software from other companies with the iPod.
This was a dumb case and a waste of court resources. Good to see the jury agree with that.
As much as I find DRM despicable, it’s hard to deny that Apple (and everyone else) still has a legal right to employ it. Another verdict would have been uncharted territory and opened up thousands of questions with regards to what technologies companies are allowed to employ. Never the less, I find apple’s response was totally insincere:
DRM is *never* done for the sake of user experience since it exists solely to restrict the user. The plaintiffs were absolutely right from a technical perspective, DRM does strengthen vendor lock. Developers who can not provide the integration that consumers expect, due to DRM locks imposed by market leaders, are at a major competitive disadvantage through no fault of their own. Generally speaking I do sympathize with developers who are negatively affected by DRM, but the problem with the case is that the law simply doesn’t require companies to open up the technology to competitors (be it apple or microsoft or oracle, etc). Until the law changes, we can expect DRM technology to be used increasingly to control access to the masses.
Edit: I’m thinking beyond this case…society will have to revisit the broad issues of how DRM tech has the potential to stifle the ability of developers to compete as ever more consumer devices, software, media, etc get locked down with multinational companies holding all the keys.
Edited 2014-12-16 21:01 UTC
Remember too that Apple never wanted DRM and removed it as soon as the labels allowed.
The music industry tried to end Apples’ dominance of the paid music download by allowing competing stores(Amazon) to have DRM free music and making Apple continue with DRM.
ClockworkZombie,
I’d agree that’s probably the image they wanted to convey, in backroom deals I’m not so sure. Anyways the problem is that apple actively took steps to block competitors from implementing DRM media that would play on customer ipods. I believe apple’s actions were it’s own and not the result of arm twisting. After all, looking back at apple’s technology in the past decade we begin to see a trend of apple locking down consumer devices and blocking out competing stores.
Bear in mind I maintain what apple does is legal. I merely find it unfortunate how the leading tech companies are using their influence to transform the computing landscape into closed ecosystems.
Edit: Ironically RealNetworks is no better, they were DRM pioneers before apple was on the scene. They are just going after apple because apple succeeded in grabbing the market, but I am certain RealNetworks would have done the same thing to apple if they had the chance.
Edited 2014-12-17 00:55 UTC
DRM was the problem, Steve Jobs in 2007 wrote an open letter asking for the end of DRM. Here is an excerpt.
The problem I have buying music online these days is regional restrictions. HDtracks would enjoy a lot more of my money but for this.
Apple has concluded that if it licenses FairPlay to others, it can no longer guarantee to protect the music it licenses from the big four music companies. Perhaps this same conclusion contributed to Microsoft’s recent decision to switch their emphasis from an “open†model of licensing their DRM to others to a “closed†model of offering a proprietary music store, proprietary jukebox software and proprietary players.
The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.
Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.
It hasn’t done much for the movie industry either. I wonder when the MPAA are going to follow the RIAA’s lead. I think it’s only a matter of time, esp is broadband gets faster and hard/flash drives get bigger. Pretty soon you’ll be able to download movies and TV shows as fast as you used to download music.
The movies are not going to follow music’s lead.
You see, the music got DRM-free not because RIAA had a change of heart. It got free, because Apple became too powerful in its negotiation position. They had almost a monopoly in online music sales and DRM was blocking the emergence of any other player. If they wanted to have any other music stores, like Amazons’ or Googles’, DRM had to go.
In movies, the situation is different. You have several streaming services, that ‘compete’ against each other (Netflix, Amazon Prime…) and that MPAA can play against each other. They will not have the negotiation position that Apple got. Therefore, there will be not DRM-free movies any time soon.
ClockworkZombie,
This focuses on the other half of the competition problem with DRM, in particular that Apple fairplay restricted media can’t play on competing devices without giving those devices the ability to decrypt the streams. That is the catch-22 with DRM, in order to legitimately play a stream, a device needs to be able to decrypt it, thereby opening up a vulnerability. This is an inherent problem for all DRM systems, not just apple’s fairplay.
However take note that my prior post referred to allowing competitors to securely distribute their own content for the ipod, which is what RealNetworks was doing before apple blocked them. The ipod technically could play secure media from competing stores without creating new vulnerabilities that users might use to defeat apple’s fairplay DRM. So the “big four” wouldn’t have a reason to object on these grounds. In fact, as you suggested earlier, the media companies wanted to see more online stores in the mix. So if anything, they probably would have wanted more channels pushing media securely to owners of the most popular music player at the time, which was the ipod.
Apple used the media companies as a scape goat for unpopular DRM while simultaneously taking the opportunity to lock ipod users to itunes even though this isn’t a technical requirement in order for DRM to work. I can see how people who don’t understand encryption might mistakenly assume it is.
Without knowing him, it’s hard for me to judge whether Steve Job’s words were genuinely his feelings or if it was just a public persona he was putting on to shift the fire to the media companies. I tend to believe the later because if this was genuinely his attitude, then I have a truly difficult time understanding how he allowed apple to repeat & perfect the much more restrictive walled garden model with the iphone. Where was this Steve Jobs then?
Edited 2014-12-17 05:21 UTC
I of course do not know Steve Jobs either, I have read that music was a passion. My take would be the blocking of competitors DRM is a side effect but a useful one.
The App store which came about later is a pure business decision, I remember there was a lot of concern from carriers at the time that access to the iPhone by third parties could cause baseband issues.
I dislike DRM and even though I buy such items I only purchase them if I can remove it, DRM free options being first choice.
I do not think you can force a company to interoperate if they do not want to it would be different if they licence FairPlay to someone then denied others.
Other people trying to sell DRMed music for iPods were trying to capitalise on Apple’s work, do you remember how bad MP3 players were before the iPod? having to make playlists on the device and so on. I was a minidisc fan before the iPod and jumped ship a couple years later when upgrading as the user experience is better.
to equate DRM plus itunes to the IOS walled garden is IMHO impossible.
They are totally different things. The walls arond IOS are not there to prevent good stuff from happening but rather to prevent malware and badly developed apps from doing stuff they shouldn’t.
Granted that theese walls do get in the way at times but in general I actually prefer it to Android.
Why should a Solitaire App need unrestricted access to my email and contacts?
sorry, that App is not fit for purpose. Strange that the IOS version of the same app fits in with the Apple guidelines and runs very well. It was only because I had the IOS verion on my old company iPhone and wanted to run in my Android Tablet that I realised what a load of [redacted] the Android Application environment is.
Frankly, I’d prefer to be safe rather than sorry.
shotsman,
I wasn’t equating it as such, I think you overlooked the gist of what I was getting at. I’d like you to re-read Steve Jobs words in the modern context of apps.
I cannot fathom how the man who uttered these words would be responsible for pushing such restrictive consumer technologies. This is why it’s so hard to believe these words were a reflection of Steve Job’s core values rather than the convenient thing to say at the time.
Who’s arguing that it should? I’ve been pushing the sandbox concept since before the iphone. The issue is that apple has gone above and beyond this by denying users access to alternative stores, which would have clearly been the best for consumers, reusing Steve Job’s sentiment above.
But nobody is suggesting taking away the apple store. If you feel more secure with the apple store, then … drum roll please … keep using it! The reason this argument is so tedious to me is that the people complaining about other stores would never have been forced to use them. Since their “choice” remains unaffected, it really boils down to eliminating the choices of others.
Edit: I’d just like to add that curated stores can be a great idea *if* consumers can choose them. I’d be happy to endorse such a model. You see this competition would lead to specialization. One store might specialize in kids apps, obviously some for games (ie steam, indy bundle, etc), another in business apps, etc. They would likely do a better job serving user needs than apple’s policy of tethering them to a single store.
Edited 2014-12-17 15:49 UTC