Where Are the Digital Rights?

I’ve been get­ting con­sid­er­able amounts of email from mac fanat­ics about yesterday’s piece on the new Apple music store. As a result, I’d like to expand on the sub­ject (as I have to a few peo­ple via email today).

The prob­lem that I have is not with Apple in par­tic­u­lar but with the approach they are tak­ing. At the cur­rent time, MP3 is the clos­est thing there is to a stan­dard for sound on the Inter­net. To offer some­thing that devi­ates is no a prob­lem as long as that some­thing is an open stan­dard that can be imple­mented on other plat­forms by other people.

With the choice of AAC as the new stan­dard, Apple is going the pro­pri­etary route and that’s what I dis­agree with. There are other stan­dards out there that offer bet­ter com­pres­sion than MP3 (Ogg Vor­bis, for exam­ple, seems to be a good alter­na­tive and hap­pens to be an open for­mat. So while Apple is sell­ing the “bet­ter com­pres­sion, smaller size” gospel, its only inter­est in AAC is that it allows for them to lock things down for now as AAC is only sup­ported in Quick­time and iTunes, two prod­ucts offered by Apple.

Also not touted in yesterday’s announce­ment was any men­tion of Apple’s new DRM solu­tion. Accord­ing to an arti­cle on Sunspot.net, Apple was not that con­cerned about com­pres­sion when it decided on AAC. The arti­cle men­tions that Apple would for­sake the famil­iar MP3 for­mat, which lacks the abil­ity to embed DRM, in favor of a DRM– capa­ble for­mat called Advanced Audio Cod­ing (AAC). What­ever the extent of Apple’s DRM, it must be firm enough to quell the record com­pa­nies’ fear of piracy. How come that part was left out of yesterday’s announcements?

The rea­son I am sus­pi­cious of the offer­ing is that there is lit­tle men­tion any­where as to why the music indus­try would license its music to Apple and give such a hard time to any­one else. My sus­pi­cion is that there are some agree­ments between Apple and the music indus­try that we are not made aware of. After all, why else would Hillary Rosen, head of the RIAA, call the ser­vice a fresh start in the whole online music scene?