The Zeitgeist

[Update: I totally missed Ms. Stacie Somers of San Diego County, another gold-digger wanna be... Macalope covers it nicely...]

It’s interesting how Apple has become everyone’s favorite whipping boy lately. The latest salvo in the “If I sue Apple maybe I’ll get rich” war has been fired by a Florida resident named “Frederick Black” who claims that Floridians have been “victimized” by Apple because their iPods can’t play WMA-protected songs.

First off, there are plenty of MP3 players on the market. Apple’s happens to play unprotected MP3 and AAC files. Microsoft’s play their own format (oddly, the Zune players themselves are incompatible with WMA and use some other DRM scheme I believe, but Mr. Black isn’t suing Microsoft I notice).

There are plenty of online music stores out there besides iTunes… Let’s see… there’s Microsoft’s, there’s Amazon’s, there’s WalMart’s, and that’s not even counting the online stores run by several of the music labels themselves. All of them sell either unprotected MP3’s which will work on anyone’s MP3 player, or WMA-protected tracks which will only work on Microsoft players (except as noted before on the Zune). Mr Black can purchase tunes from any non-protected site, or get a physical CD and copy the tracks onto his iPod that way.

Given the large number of payers and music services as well as the buy-a-CD option, I am not sure how Mr. Black and his fellow Floridians are being mistreated by Apple…

Apple actually has the most liberal policy of any of the device manufacturers and/or online stores. You can free an iTunes track from it’s AAC copy-protection by burning it to a CD and then re-importing it, you can also pay a little more for completely un-protected tracks. Just try that on the Microsoft store. Let me know how that works out for you, ok? Oh, and Apple let’s you sync your music to an unlimited number of iPods, too. And with a WMA protected device/music? Uh… not so much.

Apple also doesn’t mess around with your music collection applying DRM to your existing music. If you have any Microsoft player, including the new Zune, Microsoft applies its DRM system to your music that was NOT purchased from them or an affiliated online store. Once they do that your music collection is effectively frozen and can never be moved onto a new device. Unless, of course, you go re-import all your CDs, etc.

“Mr. Black” and all the get-rich-quick crowd need to step back and see that they’ve got it pretty good with their iPods. I’ll go out on a limb and bet that most of what Apple is doing with regard to DRM is more than likely a side-effect of their agreements with the labels and the RIAA — the folks who are suing grandmothers and teenagers and are now trying to tell consumers that they have no right to rip their own music collections and listen to them whenever they want to and/or on devices of their own choosing…

In fact, I’ll go even further… I’ll say that at the moment the only thing standing between the Rest of Us and a world where every single piece of information is DRMed, lock-boxed and pay-for-played is Apple.