Apple's Not the Bad Guy
Friday, February 9, 2007
If the major record labels were as concerned about nurturing consumers of legal downloads as they are with preventing illegal downloads, maybe they wouldn't be in the financial downward spiral they're in right now.
Every chance they get, the labels are trying to make it less appealing to purchase legal downloads. Steve Jobs, loving his gig as the most powerful person is the music business, re-ignited his cat fight with the four major record labels this week by posting an essay on the Apple web site titled "Thoughts on Music." In it, he responds to repeated calls from Warner, Universal, EMI and Sony BMG that Apple makes songs purchased through iTunes available to be played on mp3 players other than the iPod.
His response is that the major labels should abandon the required DRM (Digital Rights Management) software...
Net Neutrality in Canada - Tory government selling out?
Canada appears to give in to telecoms lobby groups and give up on network neutrality.
Apparently the Canadian press has dug up information that the Tory government is not going to introduce network neutrality.
Frankly, as a Canadian, I am disgusted.
Any company opposing network neutrality is doing nothing but trying to impose taxes on data traffic they do not own, and trying to make sure that 'small voices' do not get heard equally. I am sure the RIAA would love net neutrality going down in flames as it would allow them to get ISPs to tax 'mp3' file transfers (it could be done - stateful packet inspection of data streams; all the governments would have to do is outlaw encrypted streams or mandate encryption they and the ISPs have keys to, which would make encryption useless)...
