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I was trying to explain how wonderful Apple's digital rights management compromise was to a skeptical music lover when I began to realize that I must not have gotten it quite right. I started to do some digging and was surprised by what I found because a) Apple is not at all forthcoming about exactly how the scheme works and b) the more I learned, the more my friend's suspicions seemed to be borne out.
Did you know that:
1) You must have an internet connection to authorize or deauthorize a computer? Each computer that needs to be authorized must be able to connect to the net. Nowhere in the TILs that I found was this noted. The reason?:
2) Apple stores unique machine identifying information on a central server in order to maintain a record of which computer's you've authorized. I had (the erroneous) impression that the downloaded file somehow had a watermark embedded in it that allowed you to access it but, of course this wouldn't allow for changing authorized machines after purchasing music.
3) The identifying info used seems to be the MAC address on your ethernet card (i.e. it appears possible to authorize a bunch of of machines from behind a router or Airport base station). This coupled with,
4) Apple's insistence that machine authorization is entirely the responsibility of the user (if you sell a machine and fail to deauthorize it, Apple says you're out of luck) and that,
5) Apple's lisence agreement stipulates that they can discontinue or alter their service at any time leaves a number of unanswered questions.
What happens if your machine gets fubared and requires a mobo replacement? No deauthorization possible.
What happens if your machine gets stolen? No deauthorization possible.
What happens if your router gets fried? No deauthorization possible.
What happens if Apple decides to get out of the music business or alter the service (think about the whole .Mac debacle)? You may end up in a situation where you will not be able to authorize any new machines to legally transfer music to.
Yes of course you can get around much of this by converting to AIFFs and burning discs of every track you buy but, especially if you end up buying a lot of music it's a big kludge IMHO. Not only that but running an AAC => AIFF => mp3/AAC loop may result in poorer quality audio in the end product.
The thing that bothers me the most about all this, however, is exactly how careful Apple has been to not reveal this information publicly. Having centralized DRM, storing unique machine identifiers, necessitating calls to the mothership for users to make changes. This sounds an awful lot like a M$ solution to me than an Apple one.
... sigh ... there I've said it. Flame away.
P.S. we'll leave the debate about audio quality of 128k AAC files to another day.
Did you know that:
1) You must have an internet connection to authorize or deauthorize a computer? Each computer that needs to be authorized must be able to connect to the net. Nowhere in the TILs that I found was this noted. The reason?:
2) Apple stores unique machine identifying information on a central server in order to maintain a record of which computer's you've authorized. I had (the erroneous) impression that the downloaded file somehow had a watermark embedded in it that allowed you to access it but, of course this wouldn't allow for changing authorized machines after purchasing music.
3) The identifying info used seems to be the MAC address on your ethernet card (i.e. it appears possible to authorize a bunch of of machines from behind a router or Airport base station). This coupled with,
4) Apple's insistence that machine authorization is entirely the responsibility of the user (if you sell a machine and fail to deauthorize it, Apple says you're out of luck) and that,
5) Apple's lisence agreement stipulates that they can discontinue or alter their service at any time leaves a number of unanswered questions.
What happens if your machine gets fubared and requires a mobo replacement? No deauthorization possible.
What happens if your machine gets stolen? No deauthorization possible.
What happens if your router gets fried? No deauthorization possible.
What happens if Apple decides to get out of the music business or alter the service (think about the whole .Mac debacle)? You may end up in a situation where you will not be able to authorize any new machines to legally transfer music to.
Yes of course you can get around much of this by converting to AIFFs and burning discs of every track you buy but, especially if you end up buying a lot of music it's a big kludge IMHO. Not only that but running an AAC => AIFF => mp3/AAC loop may result in poorer quality audio in the end product.
The thing that bothers me the most about all this, however, is exactly how careful Apple has been to not reveal this information publicly. Having centralized DRM, storing unique machine identifiers, necessitating calls to the mothership for users to make changes. This sounds an awful lot like a M$ solution to me than an Apple one.
... sigh ... there I've said it. Flame away.
P.S. we'll leave the debate about audio quality of 128k AAC files to another day.