1984 Redux

It seems I may have struck a nerve with my talks about AAC and it seems that every­one sees it as a ques­tion of theft vs. pay­ing for con­tent. To me, the issue is not about theft. For starters, I do not use file shar­ing net­works. Yes, I did check Nap­ster when it was around but ulti­mately, I aban­doned the Peer to Peer net­works, largely because the qual­ity of the files that could be found on those ser­vices was lack­lus­ter at best. I do, how­ever, have an exten­sive MP3 col­lec­tion. All of it is tagged with proper ID3 tags that include more infor­ma­tion than what you could find on a reg­u­lar P2P net­work (they even include cover art). I have, in the past, con­sid­ered mov­ing to Ogg Vor­bis but decided that my cur­rent invest­ment in MP3 (I burned my whole CD col­lec­tion to MP3 a long time ago and still retain the CDs as proof that I actu­ally do own the rights to that music (they are, how­ever, in a closet, gath­er­ing dust)) was work­ing fine and have not moved on.

AAC seems like an inter­est­ing for­mat. Thanks to the many peo­ple who have pointed me to Audiocod­ing, which pro­vides a free GNU-licensed AAC codec. I would like to rescind my state­ment about it being a closed format.

How­ever, still miss­ing from the dis­cus­sion is more open­ness on the part of Apple when it comes to explain­ing what they are doing with their DRM sys­tem when it comes to music. For exam­ple, why is it not made clearer on their site about the music store that you are only allowed to use a song on up to three dif­fer­ent com­put­ers? What hap­pens when I change com­puter? What if I want to use it on more than three com­put­ers? Of course, they rec­om­mend back­ups because if I don’t have them, I’ll have to buy the music again (couldn’t they keep track of what I pur­chased on the server and give me access to it? They already have my credit card info and my account info if I bought some­thing there, right? And what if it just won’t play? How many Apple users actu­ally know how to do this? I am a fairly geeky guy and that would be no prob­lem for me but I some­how doubt that peo­ple who are buy­ing macs for their ease of use would find this acceptable.

What I would like to see is a lit­tle open­ness from Apple. If you’re going to lock down my tracks, fine… as long as you tell me! Why is Apple lock­ing up files on my com­put­ers with­out ask­ing me first?

The next ques­tion sur­rounds the com­puter autho­riza­tion scheme. Do I really want Apple to know what’s on my com­puter? After all, what infor­ma­tion is given to them when I autho­rize a com­puter? We already know what infor­ma­tion they gather when you cre­ate a user ID and their pri­vacy pol­icy states that Apple may occa­sion­ally share your per­sonal con­tact infor­ma­tion with care­fully selected tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies. So, after I reg­is­ter a com­puter, not only do they know who I am, but they also know about my com­puter (where is the pri­vacy pol­icy for what infor­ma­tion they gather about my com­puter?) The track reg­is­tra­tion scheme that Apple is putting in place seems sus­pi­ciously sim­i­lar to Microsoft Pass­port.

The dif­fer­ence, many will say, is that Apple is not Microsoft. Well, con­sid­er­ing how care­fully, they pro­tect their trade secrets, I am wor­ried about what they could do with infor­ma­tion about me. Call me para­noid if you want but it seems to me that Apple is becom­ing a par­ody of itself. In 1984, with their famous mac ad, they showed them­selves as fight­ing big brother. Wouldn’t it be ironic if they were to become what they were fighting?