Downloading movies is kind of a fool’s game. You have the movie on disk, but now what? Am I going to burn it to a DVD so my kid can watch it? Probably not. I basically paid – or didn’t pay – for content I’ll never access again.
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Rumor has it that Apple will start selling DRM free content from Sony, Universal, and Warner starting December 9th. Apple has received much criticism in the past for their strict and rather dictatorial management of iTunes, however this could be a sign of things to come.

So what do you think? Is Apple delivering an early Christmas present? Could we really be moving towards a more liberal DRM system?

The Dark Knight home release will not be available until next Tuesday, December 9th, but that hasn’t stopped the cash cow flick from hitting iTunes Top Downloads of 2008. No telling if the film actually earned that spot with the amount of pre-orders or if Apple placed the film there knowing that it eventually will be a top download. Either way, chances are the film is going to be unstoppable like the Tumbler.

Will the music subscription business ever grow beyond its current niche? It looks increasingly doubtful. Today, eMusic announced that since it launched its current music subscription service in 2003, customers have downloaded 250 million songs. Apple’s iTunes, by comparison, has sold more than 5 billion songs since it opened the iTunes Store in April, 2003. That makes eMusic one twentieth the size of iTunes.

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Did you hear the news? “Norway” has a problem with the DRM used in iTunes, officially.

The country’s consumer ombudsman, which sounds a government-subsidized version of Ask Asa, said the follow in his latest report:

It’s a consumer’s right to transfer and play digital content bought and downloaded from the internet to the music device he himself chooses to use. iTunes makes this impossible or at least difficult, and hence, they act in breach of Norwegian law.

So, unless Apple gets its act together and, I guess, removes the DRM (at least for Norway), it’ll be subject to fines in the six figure (Euros, mind you) range. That’s not exactly something Apple wants to deal with, I’m guessing.

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Amazon MP3 and iTunes—the only two online music stores that really matter—have another competitor to worry about now that Wal-Mart has re-launched its own music store. The “new and improved” (joke: how can something be both “new” and “improved”?) store sells DRM-free MP3s, most of which are encoded at 256kbps; some are only 192 kbps.

Individual songs start as low as 74 cents per song, which makes the new Wal-Mart store the least expensive one in town.

Wal-Mart is also giving away one free song per week. It’ll also toss in a free song for every CD you buy, either online or in the brick-and-mortar store. That little promotion starts next month.

Lastly, because the songs are merely MP3s they’ll work on any operating system—except, maybe, Red Hat 8!

A database problem is censoring unexpected song titles including titles using the words h*t, k****r, t**n. Also affected are c***s***er, s**t, p***ya**s, and “Your Mother Spends Her C*****d D***k W***e*****y P****l” by P***y and the A**l Glands.

Apple intends to fix this problem as soon as they f***ing get around to it.

Fire up iTunes and you’ll find, for the first time, TV shows from the four major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox) in HD. It’s still $2.99 per HD episode, and that includes a standard-def version of the TV show for your iPhone or iPod.

HD shows now include hits like Lost, CSI, 30 Rock and The Office.

But we all know The Shield is the best show on TV now, so whatever.

Steve Jobs rubbished Blu-ray yesterday, calling format a “bag of hurt,” no doubt putting a tear in the eye of message boarders everywhere. (How much do you want to bet that he’ll call the next revision of the iMac “epic”?) But is that a big deal, that Apple, apparently, has no interest in incorporating Blu-ray into its computers, especially when plenty of other manufacturers have already done so?

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So I just updated the AppleTV and fired her up. There were no visual changes in the interface except for a message encouraging you to hold down the Play/Pause button to bring up other options. The options are, in order, Start Genius, Add to On-The-Go, and Cancel. Starting Genius brought up a big honking error. I’d like to take a closer look at the methods used by Genius to take a song’s “pulse,” as it were, because clearly this metadata doesn’t make it from iTunes proper and into other devices. Why, Apple, do we have to reproduce work? Aren’t we using computers?

Phew! For a second there I actually believed Apple when it threatened to shut down iTunes. Now it won’t have to, seeing as though the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington has left royalty rates unchanged.

And what does Apple have to save, now that it knows it will only have to pay 9.1 cents per song sold for at least the next five years?

We’re pleased with the CRB’s decision to keep royalty rates stable

Thanks, Apple spokesman!

The bigger issue here is that, for better or worse, Apple will remain the dominant player in the world of digital music. For all the Comes with Music and Play Now Plus decoys that come out, the labels are still going to have to deal with Jobs & Co. if they want to sell their music to a reasonable number of consumers. You can bet that the labels are more than a little annoyed.