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A Reuters article reveals that the French are after Apple for its closed, proprietary system. The proposed law would make it legal to crack digital rights management schemes to enable conversion from one format to another.
The merits of an open format for music purchased from iTunes is certainly worthy of discussion. However, that decision rests exclusively with Apple, which alone has the moral right to decided on what terms it will sell its products.
The law also provides new fines for piracy. According to the article, “Vanneste said the draft law aimed to fight piracy, encourage the development of the online digital music market in France and benefit legal online music retailers.” This is the part that really grabs my attention. “Benefit legal online music retailers”? Who is the biggest of these? Well it’s iTunes, of course. How can a law targeted at iTunes benefit iTunes?
Moreover, who exactly is the beneficiary of legalizing DRM cracking? The most popular by far online music store (iTunes) is fully compatible with the by far most popular music player (iPod). Indeed, the seemless integration is part of Apple’s success. Apple sells them as an integrated solution.
Furthermore, iTunes is not itself a profitable venture for Apple. After giving the record companies their 70% share, and covering the myriad costs of actually storing over one million songs and serving over one billion downloads, plus various other costs, iTunes just beats breaking even. The iTunes store exist for the sole purpose of driving iPod sales (where Apple makes a very handsome profit). Those iPod sales are also helping drive computer sales, which are likewise profitable.
Again, I get back to the theme of Apple’s integration of its hardware, software, and services. It’s a beautiful system that has made the company worth more than Sony (based on market capitalization). France is meddling with this system, and it has no right to. Thankfully, Apple seems likely to show more backbone than most businesses, and may very well withdraw iTunes from France, to the detriment of the French people. If you cannot accept the terms of a sale, you simply decline. The French people are free to buy their music from other sources, but if they want to use iTunes, they must adhere to the license they agreed to when they signed up.
Here’s an excerpt from the iTunes France terms of service:
Vous comprenez que le Service, de même que les produits achetés via le Service, tels que des enregistrements sonores, des vidéos et les illustrations qui leur sont associées (“Produits”), met en œuvre un système de sécurité reposant sur une technologie qui protège les informations numériques et limite votre utilisation des Produits à certaines règles d’utilisation établies par iTunes et ses concédants de licences (“Règles d’Utilisation”). Vous acceptez de vous conformer à ces Règles d’Utilisation, telles qu’exprimées ci-après, et vous vous engagez à ne pas enfreindre ni tenter d’enfreindre aucun élément de sécurité. Vous vous engagez à ne pas essayer (ni aider une autre personne) de contourner, accéder au code source, décompiler, désassembler, ou d’interférer de quelque façon que ce soit sur les éléments de sécurité liés à ces Règles d’Utilisation, pour quelque motif que ce soit.
And here’s the same excerpt from the US iTunes terms of service, which has the exact same stipulations:
You understand that the Service, and products purchased through the Service, such as sound recordings, videos and related artwork (“Products”), include a security framework using technology that protects digital information and limits your usage of Products to certain usage rules established by Apple and its licensors (“Usage Rules”). You agree to comply with such Usage Rules, as further outlined below, and you agree not to violate or attempt to violate any security components. You agree not to attempt to, or assist another person to, circumvent, reverse-engineer, decompile, disassemble, or otherwise tamper with any of the security components related to such Usage Rules for any reason whatsoever.
The Bloomberg headline, "Hamas Refuses to Recognize Israel After Moscow Talks" reveals the absurdity of the entire Palestinian movement. Hamas is a terrorist organization, recently elected as the goverment of the Palestinian Authority. Israel is a real state. It has a stable government and, more importantly, protects individual rights. As a result, it is fairly affluent. "Palestine" is utterly destitute. Individual rights, such as property rights, are not respected, and the region lives off donations from the West. The political organization Hamas now controls is like a mosquito: small, parasitic, and ultimately ephemeral. And yet it has the audacity to refuse to even recognize Israel. It's mind-blowing.
The article tells us that "Putin last month invited Hamas to visit Moscow and said the international community should recognize the Palestinians' choice of Hamas to lead their next government." Indeed, the Palestinians freely chose a terrorist organization to lead it. What does this tell us about the legitimacy of Palestine? What about the "innocence" of the Palestinian people? I'm not saying that all Palestinians are evil and deserve to die. I am, however, saying that everyone who voted for Hamas is evil.
Israel should not allow this charade to continue. It ought to unilaterally destroy the Palestinian Authority. It should loudly proclaim its moral right to exist, and to aggressively defend itself against those who seek its destruction.
The South Korean government is currently investigating Samsung over the "unfairly low price" it is being paid by Apple for the flash memory used in iPods. Apparently Samsung is providing the chips at a cheaper price than what Korean music player manufacturers are paying. Yesterday Apple announced that it would prepay Samsung for $500 million worth of flash memory chips. I'm not sure about South Korea's Fair Trade Commission, but it seems to me that if a company places a half-billion dollar order--and pays in advance--that company is probably going to get a cheaper per-unit price than someone buying less. It's called the economies of scale.
By what right do those less successful competitors complain to the government? Do they have a right to flash memory chips? Can they set their own price? Do they have any legitimate say in the private transaction between Samsung and Apple?
I want to give kudos to America's oil companies for their behavior at today's hearing of the Senate Engergy and Commerce Committee. Yes, it would have been nice is they have tore into the Senators as vicious thieves, but given the current situation, I am quite content for them to just politely-- but unappologetically--defend their profits. MSNBC has one account of the hearing. There are some other facts, not in the article, worth mentioning too. The oil industry, in a year of record profits, is still making 0.1% below the national average profit margin. Also conveniently ignored is the highly cyclical nature of the oil industry. It is truly boom and bust. The booms, such as at present, are the only way they can afford to stay afloat in the abysmal bust periods. Remember when you could get a gallon of gas for under $1, only a few years ago? That meant hard times for the "working people" who happen to work in the oil industry. Apparently Senator Boxer forgets that there are a lot of people who actually work in these industries. Perhaps the tree-huggers in California are not that concerned with the people who research, explore, drill, and refine oil. I suppose those Texans and Alaskans aren't really "working" when they put in the long hours that enable her to fly between the west and east coasts, preaching her hatred.
The Australian has an even better article, "Big Oil takes Senate back to school." Best quote:
ExxonMobil chairman Lee Raymond dispassionately explained why oil companies and politicians would find it difficult to agree, noting the different timelines his industry and the politicians worked under.Snap!"In politics, time is measured in two, four or six years, based on the election cycle. In the energy industry, time is measured in decades, based on the life cycles of our projects."
ExxonMobil had just announced the first oil and gas production from its Sakhalin-1 Project in Russia's far east, he said. "We began work on the project over 10 years ago, when prices were very low, and we expect it to produce for over 40 years ... that's more then 50 years for one project. Fifty years is 25 congresses and 12 presidential terms. Fifty years ago, Dwight Eisenhower was president of the US."
InformationWeek has a new article, "Sun Updates StarOffice; Touts Open Document Advantage Over Microsoft." Before I mock Sun Microsystems, I should say that I do, in fact, like the idea of StarOffice (and the free variant, OpenOffice.org). It's a full-fledged office suite that you can get for free (in the case of OpenOffice.org) or for very little money (StarOffice). That being said, you still get what you pay for. Microsoft Office is a categorically superior product in every way. It looks better, is faster and easier to use, has all sorts of special features for power users, integrates tightly with Windows and the programs within the suite, and is written in cleaner, more efficient code. It's also rather expensive.
The newest version of StarOffice supports the Open Document Format. Massachusetts, in a capriciously bizarre and arbitrary decision, has decided that all state documents must, starting at a point in the not-do-distant future, be in ODF. This leads us to two quotes from the article:
"For most customers and in the short term, the biggest selling point to StarOffice 8 is the enhanced Microsoft Office compatibility," said Herb Hinstorff, the director of marketing for Sun's client systems group "People familiar with Office can load the program and go."Let's examine the second quote first. Are Microsoft Office documents "locked into a single program"? First of all, Office is not going away any time soon. Secondly, Microsoft provides a free reader program so that even if you don't have Office, you can still view Office documents. Furthermore, let's look at the first quote by Mr. Hinstorff. He's not just talking about a vaguely similar visual style. StarOffice natively reads Office documents. So too do other competitor's products. The so-called "open" format of ODF is currently available only in StarOffice, which has an insignificant market share.In the longer-run, though, Sun's betting on ODF to put StarOffice on the map, and steal market share from Microsoft. "Longer term, ODF will be crucial as more and more governments take a look at it," Hinstorff said. "They don't want their documents locked to a single program.
I am wholly confident that people in 100 years will be able to read any Office documents I make, without resorting to extraordinary means. I am far less confident that the ODF will ever be so pervasive.
