…dream a little dream of me….
Mamas and Papas (or Satchmo, if you prefer his sandpaper). And thank you W.Schwant /F.Andre/G.Kahn whoever you may be.
I was trying to work out a post title for DRM and then decided not to, too schmaltzy. But Mama Cass’s voice meant I kept the song reference in.
This has been a confusing week for me as I watch events unfold in the DRM space. Take a look at this, which came to me courtesy Charlie Wood at Spanning, the Moonwatcher.
Let me get this right: Windows RSS Platform to ship without secure feed support. And that goes for all of IE7? No way to get anything RSS other than vanilla news. No Hotmail, no Amazon, no eBay. No authentication support at all?
Mmmhm. Don’t understand. Maybe it’s because my head was still buzzing with the iTunes stuff.
I’m still getting over the French decision re Apple and iTunes. I am no fan of DRM per se, but I needed to get my head around the decision.
Today you can buy any-format music and get it to play on an iPod.
Today you can manage any-format music regardless of origin via iTunes.
But IF you buy music from iTunes (which you don’t have to do) THEN you can only buy it in AAC format and FairPlay-protected and so on.
And the French have refused that constraint. And we may not have iTunes in France. I guess that’s like saying we don’t have internet gambling in the US. Well, fine.
The decision is interesting, because I want everything to be DRM free, yet have this nagging feeling that what was decided makes no sense.
Let me try this on pens, something physical. Let’s make a Parker pen an iPod. Just humour me, please. Let’s assume Parker pens outsell all other fountain pens, that they created the category and zoomed into world domination mode.
Then they made sure you could buy ink from anywhere, not just Parker ink, and put it into your Parker pen. So people were freer about how they used their pens.
Then let’s assume that you had a pen maintenance kit that came with the pen. Dropper, nib cleaner, blotter, whatever. And again Parker outsold everything else. And they made sure that you could use the pen maintenance kit for pens other than Parker.
And let’s assume you had Parker shops. But they only sold Parker pens and Parker ink and Parker everything.
Because that’s what it was, a Parker shop. End of allegory.
Maybe the French are right. But right now I think we have bigger issues to resolve re DRM than this.