Apple is facing quite the legal challenge in Norway because you can’t play DRM’d, iTunes-purchased songs on devices other than the iPod. The law in Norway is such that, here, consumers have the right to play music on any device of their choosing. Since Apple’s DRM prevents this from happening, it’s being dragged into court. It has until November 3 to respond to the lawsuit.
The suit has been brought by Norway’s Consumer Ombudsman.
Now, we can sit here and hem and haw over the fact that, yes, you technically can play your DRM’d, iTunes-purchased music on any device in the whole wide world by simply burning them to a CD, but that doesn’t fall under the realm of “easy,” which is another clause of the Norwegian law. That is, songs have to be “easily” playable on any device, not just “technically” feasible.
“Now, we can sit here and hem and haw over the fact that, yes, you technically can play your DRM’d, iTunes-purchased music on any device in the whole wide world by simply burning them to a CD…”
Huh? I want to know exactly how one plays a CD on an MP3 player. Hem and haw all you like….it can’t be done.
No….technically or otherwise I think it is very clear that Apple does not comply with the standard of their law. At least, as presented here that is. I don’t know the verbage of their law so I might be wrong.
I have an iPod….and I never use it. Never. Simply because of Apple’s perpetual policy of proprietary technology. For the same reason I don’t have an iPhone.
I would love to see somebody port Android to the iPhone though….do away with the proprietary crap and really have a great device.
“Huh? I want to know exactly how one plays a CD on an MP3 player. Hem and haw all you like….it can’t be done.”
I hear (by the people who actually use the iTunes crap) that you burn the DRM’d files to a CD as an audio disc, then rip that disc with the MP3 ripper of your choice. Then, after a lot of annoyances, you have non-DRM’d music files. So, yeah, you missed the point but confirmed the articles idea of it not being easy or even known to some people.
I can’t believe people have been stupid enough to make itunes successful in the first place. For one thing they screwed up the portable media player market by showing that people are dumb enough to pay that much money for a device. And on the topic, see how easy it is to try and explain how to burn a cd, and then explain how to turn around and rip that cd into another media format like mp3, and then transfer it to their media player. Find an average person who doesn’t know much about computers and see how long it takes you to accomplish walking them through the process. Sometimes it’s hard just walking someone through changing a setting on their computer.
John, CD ripping allows you to create music files from CD files (legally in Canada and the US, as far as I know).
There may be a noticeable loss in quality if the re-sampling rate is too low or the re-encoding method is not of high enough, so you may be able to argue lack of portability this way.
Hahahahahahahaha!!!!!!1one i am so happy is getting sued!