MercuryNews.com | 06/15/2005 | Music industry eyes `casual piracy':
Copy protection raises an even bigger problem for the millions of people who own Apple's iPod digital music player and use its iTunes software to organize their music and create custom CDs. Apple has refused to license its FairPlay rights-management software -- even to the labels. That means certain copy-protected CDs won't work with iTunes or the iPod without employing time-consuming work-arounds.
``They do not play on iPods simply because Apple has this proprietary approach,'' said Thomas Hesse, Sony BMG's president of global digital business, of Sony BMG's copy-protected CDs. ``We would be willing and able to put'' FairPlay ``on CDs in an instant if Steve Jobs would flick the switch and allow us to do that.''
Umm, tell that to all the songs in my iTunes library. They don't seem to be in any proprietary format, they are high resolution MP3s, ripped from physical CDs that I bought from some music store. I do have 151 DRM enabled tracks, mostly freebies from Apple, as well as a few that I actually purchased from the iTunes store. Expressed as a percentage of my total tracks (151/33955), or 0.44%, a pretty small number are restricted via the “proprietary approach” claimed by Sony's putz-in-residence, Hesse.
No, Sony's DRM audio disc thingies (which are not CDs, because they don't meet the spec) are actually the ones in proprietary formats. By the way, 2+2 still does not equal 5, regardless of what the p.i.r. Hesse claims.
More here
