Apple resists adding iPod piracy filters
By Leslie Poston
Apple fans should be dancing with joy as Apple decides to hold out against adding piracy filters to its iPod line. This is great news for people who want to listen to their entire music collection on their mp3 player, regardless of whether the songs came from CDs, iTunes, eMusic, a friend sending a recommendation or, yes, even P2P sharing.
Unlike Apple, Microsoft has caved to the demands of the industry and will be developing user-hated piracy filters for the Zune. There are no existing filters for every device, so each company would have to develop their own at heavy cost. Microsoft is slated to develop a filter for videos on the Zune first, followed by music filers and anti-copying filters.
This is bad news for people who love music and movies and who push for portability of their data. they feel that if they download something to their device or buy a CD, both should be able to be copied for back up and also used on whatever device they own, instead of having to buy the same song or album in multiple formats to satisfy a greedy industry.
When NBC, the driving force behind the desire for piracy filters (and a key opponent to Apple’s fixed price structure, resulting in a refusal to sell NBC content on iTunes) why they were pushing companies so hard for filtering, they had this to say: “In the long term, the consumer wants there to be quality premium-produced content,” according to NBC’s Perrette. “And in order for that to continue to be a viable business, there needs to be significant protection around it.”
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May 9th, 2008
Dancing with joy? Not exactly.
The supposed piracy filter that Microsoft “sold” NBC was just a fig leaf for NBC trying desperately to prevent Apple from having 100% market share in music and video downloads.
Microsoft doesn’t know how to put on piracy filters without taking away its customers’ current rights, and being sued to Hell. Even the NYT story that they were discussing it blew up into a PR disaster that had to be denied.
So, I absolutely DO NOT want Apple to put on “piracy filters” that would confuse my legally-obtained material as being anything else. But Apple has no more intention of doing it than Microsoft does.
And after a while, NBC will have to admit that this foolishness about giving an exclusive to the Zune, with the potential that the relationship will brick the device, is an absolute guarantee against anybody downloading their shows. Even the anti-Apple fanboys.
So the only thing Apple is doing is not being asinine. Big deal.