Here is a great write about about a Financial Times article talking about the Movie Studios discussing the need to increase Apple’s Fair Play restrictions and add a “tax” on each iPod sales.
Here are some of my favorites from the article:
Note: this quote is from the Financial Times article as is from the Movie Studios.? Also it was after talking about digital piracy being $3.2 billion a year and alluding to it being mostly Apple’s falt.
? ? Currently, content on iTunes can be uploaded to an unlimited number of iPods. This means people can freely copy music content by ???synching??? their iPods with their friends??? computers.
? ? The studios are putting pressure on Apple to limit the number of iPods that can be used by iTunes on a particular computer. Limiting the number of video iPods used by any one computer to four or five will, they believe, deter professional content pirates.
Note: This part is from the article discussing the FT article and trying to debunk any FUD.
Two facts conveniently ignored by the FT journalist:
1. iTunes doesn???t let you sync files from an iPod to a computer except for FairPlay files and you need the username and password for the account the FairPlay files were purchased under.
2. The fact that 3rd party tools exist to let you sync any file from any iPod to any computer does not matter. Why? Because a copy of a FairPlay file is useless without the username and passord for the account the file was purchased under.To share a FairPlay file you also have to share the username and password. I doubt this happens to any measurable extent:
1. Your credit card is linked to your username and password (meaning someone else will be buying Britney Spears songs with your money, and more importantly, in your name).
2. Someone else will be using up one of your 5 computer authorizations.
Clearly, the movie industry is out to mislead anyone it can in hopes to get folks to it’s side of this issue.? It’s side of this issue is all about taking more of our rights in order to charge us more money to get back each of those rights in turn.? If we have the right to share a movie with a friend, they want to take that a way and charge us for that right.? If we have the right to watch an infinite number of times, they want to take that away and charge us for a limited number of viewings (that way they can charge again and again!).? You can see the pattern here.
Let’s be vigilant and talk to our law makers and talk with our pocket books!