Kim Cameron's Identity Weblog

Ben Laurie thinks I was damning digital rights technology when I complained about not being being able to burn some of the Modern Times songs I had paid for and downloaded. He writes:

“Kim’s got all steamed up over iTunes’ DRM.

“Perhaps a better target for his vitriol would be his own company’s DRM, which will not only prevent you from burning stuff to CD, it’ll even remove your right to play it after you’ve purchased it.”

Why?  The parties to a transaction may feel fine about a contract limiting the number of times content can be burned or played.  I have nothing against that.  Let a thousand flowers bloom.  I'm not against technological capabilities, if they are reliable and people want to use them.

But I went to iTunes for two reasons.  First, it had the album that I wanted to burn to CD.  Second, its policy said you can burn your downloaded songs onto CD seven times.

If iTunes had announced more draconian rules, I just wouldn't have gone there.

The problem is that some of the songs were not covered by the announced policy. 

Some have argued the tracks in question aren't songs, they are “videos”. 

I still think they're songs even though you can see Dylan's mouth moving.  At any rate, for four titles – that I also paid for – the sound of Dylan and his band is now caged up inside  iTunes’ proprietary environment.  I can't burn them.  And I can't hear them in my car, on my stereo, or on my television.  I have to use the iTunes application.

Selling me songs and then saying they're not songs and that they're bonus items is really the pits.  iTunes songs cost $1.00 each.  There are 10 songs on the album that can be burned to CD (cost of that is $10.00).  But I paid $14.00.  So the extra songs are not a bonus – they're charged at the same rate as all the other songs – but can't be burned.

All of this is what leads Cory Doctorow to ask if there is a two-tiered music distribution system emerging, and I think it's a very good question.

Julian Bond takes Cory's “new business model” thinking even further:

Cory has been talking about : Kim Cameron having trouble with missing tracks from Bob Dylan's CD “Modern Times”

There's another way to get Modern Times and burn it to a CD: you can buy it from AllOfMP3.com

But go here and you'll find AllOfMp3 only have the 10 tracks off the Audio CD. Not the 4 tracks off the DVD.

I think we're going to see more and more of this. A CD packaged with a DVD containing videos of additional tracks. Ripping the audio from the DVD's videos is considerably harder than ripping a CD to MP3. And it opens up an avenue for the record companies (and by implication iTMS) to change the rules.

To a certain extent I admire this. It's a way of making the physical object worth more than the digital download. But it can also be seen as yet another example of DRM. In this case, the stronger DRM present on a DVD than the unprotected audio CD. The big downside of course is that the DVD is only playable on a DVD player. Which for many will mean no playing in the car, on a portable CD player or on the average stereo. That seems quite a strange idea. Music that can only be played on a television.

Just when I was getting over being traumatized by a glitch in the iTunes user interface, Cory stirred me up again.  Good thing that the tracks I can actually play on my stereo are so wonderful.    

If you buy the latest Bob Dylan album from the iTunes Music Store, be prepared to lose four of the tracks when you burn it to CD. Four of the tracks on “Modern Times,” which is only sold as a whole album on the iTMS, are only made available as video files, and iTunes isn't designed to allow you to burn the audio portion of a video when you burn your CD.

The CD version of “Modern Times” comes as a 14-track disc that includes the audio of the four iTunes videos; also included with the CD is a DVD carrying the four videos. In other words, if you buy the packaged good, you get the audio and the videos for the final four songs, if you buy the iTunes Store version, you only get the un-burnable videos for them.

I got this information from Amazon and I suspect Cory did the same.  But I haven't actually seen the molecular product, which is confusing because there are two versions as well, so maybe the same problem of unrippable music exists there.  It doesn't change much, despite what deadlocked says. 

The iTunes experience is lauded for its consistency and fairness, and for the ease with which iTunes customers can convert their purchased songs into MP3s. But this is a dramatic failure of the consistency, clarity and ease of iTunes.

First, when you attempt to burn the album (with the video-files, which are only distinguished from the audio-files by a small, obscure grey icon) to CD, the iTunes error message says only that the files “cannot be burned to an audio CD,” which led Kim Cameron, an experienced computer user and IT executive, to conclude that the files were locked — an error stating that these were video files would have been clearer.

You know, Cory's right. I am an experienced computer user. And I was really confused. Maybe I'm being punished for the people I've confused with some of my own early interfaces?  I sure didn't liken any part of this experience.

Second, the whole Modern Times package defeats the simplicity of the iTunes pricing model — $0.99/track for any track. While the $14 price-tag gets you 14 “tracks,” it's not possible to buy singles from the disc, nor is there any discount for buying the whole CD instead of a tack-by-track purchase. And since four of the tracks are not “music” in the sense of being burnable and rippable, you're really paying more on a per-track basis. Remember the outcry when Edgar Bronfman, Jr threatened to raise the cost of some iTunes songs and lower the cost of others? Here we have a similar kind of differential pricing sneaking in via the back-door.

Finally, here's a way in which buying iTunes tracks creates real long-term lock-in to iTunes and iPods: since iTunes videos are locked to the Apple platform, and since the only way to get any of Modern Times through iTMS is to pay for these videos, Apple and Dylan are slyly adding some lock-in to the user experience without any explicit statement about it.

Apple could make this much better by offering both the videos and the audio, or by patching iTunes to allow for burning of the audio portion of videos. But better still would be to turn off the DRM altogether. There's another way to get Modern Times and burn it to a CD: you can buy it from AllOfMP3.com, a service of disputed legality, for a fraction of Apple's pricing. Or you can download it from a P2P network. Apple's offering costs more and does less than its competitors’. How can this possibly be good business-sense?

Well, there is one way. By providing crippleware files, Apple makes it harder to switch to a competing portable player. And by giving Apple permission to cripple his music, Bob Dylan makes it harder for his fans to change to a competing service, which in turn makes it harder for Dylan to re-negotiate his own deal with Apple. Let's hope that Apple's interests and Bob Dylan's interests remain identical forever, then, for his sake.

Now it appears Amazon had it wrong all along.  Apparently Disc 1 of the molecular version is missing the songs in the four videos as well.

Even in BrickAndMorterville you can't put the soundtracks of the DVD onto a CD because that would break other, more draconian, DRM.

So I guess I'm just supposed to accept the fact that I can't get all the songs (regardless of the format they came in) onto a CD – even though I have bought them.

Videos apparently aren't songs, although people are singing, so it's OK if they're trapped inside their iTunes cage.

That's life in Modern Times.