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:<\/p>\n
“Kim\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s got all steamed<\/font><\/a> up<\/font><\/a> over<\/font><\/a> iTunes\u00e2\u20ac\u2122<\/font><\/a> DRM<\/font><\/a>.<\/p>\n
“Perhaps a better target for his vitriol would be his own company\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s DRM, which will not only prevent you from burning stuff to CD, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll even remove<\/font><\/a> your right<\/font><\/a> to play it after you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve purchased it.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
If iTunes had announced more draconian rules, I just wouldn't have gone there.<\/p>\n
The problem is that some of the songs were not covered by the announced policy. <\/p>\n
Some have argued the tracks in question aren't songs, they are “videos”. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Implict and explicit contract versus technological capability<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":68,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/68"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=563"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}