RealNetworks slams Apple
p2pnet.net News:- Apple’s charges that RealNetworks is using “hacker tactics” are unfair, says Real in a statement.
Apple FairPlay CCÂ (Consumer-Control) technology stops people from being able to play iTunes tracks, for which they’ve paid a lot of money, on players Apple doesn’t like. Which is just about everything other than iPods.
Apple wouldn’t deal with Real to allow music from the RealPlayer ‘Music Store‘ to be “transferred” to music players in general – including iPods. So Real came up with Harmony to allow people to buy Real tracks and hear them on any player, whether Apple likes it or not.
“The purpose … is to allow you to exercise your fair-use rights under copyright law. It allows you to free your iTunes Music Store (protected AAC / m4p) purchases from their DRM restrictions with no sound quality loss. These songs can then be played outside of the iTunes environment, even on operating systems not supported by iTunes.”
Is the quote above from the Real statement? Nope. It’s from the Hymn webpage here.
Apple would refer to Hymn as a hacker site offering a hacker application because its software is designed to let people who’ve paid good money for iTunes tracks play them on any device they want.
“Compatibility, choice and quality are critically important to consumers and Harmony provides all of these to users of the iPod and over 70 other music devices including those from Creative, Rio, iRiver and others,” says RealNetworks.
“Consumers, and not Apple, should be the ones choosing what music goes on their iPod.”
RealNetworks claims its Harmony follows “a well-established tradition of legal, independent development that bypasses proprietary formats to achieve compatibility”.
That’s what p2p and other indie software developers say too.
Real cites the first IBM compatible PCs from Compaq as an “ample and clear precedent for this activity”.
“Harmony creates a way to lock content from Real’s Music Store in a way that is compatible with the iPod, Windows Media digital rights management [DRM] devices and Helix DRM devices,” RealNetworks declares, going on:
“Harmony technology does not remove or disable any DRM system. Apple has suggested that new laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act [DMCA] are relevant to this dispute. In fact, the DMCA is not designed to prevent the creation of new methods of locking content, and explicitly allows the creation of interoperable software.”
Over to Apple ….
July 30th, 2004 at 6:29 pm
Real Networks, but on this one I am totally behind them, lets just see how far they can push this to support ‘fair use’ even if it is in the best interest of their own bottom line.
..and Apple was foolish to mention the DMCA so prematurely, in fact, statements like that will only help contribute to the fight to defang the DMCA, which of course isn’t in Apples/RIAAs favour.
TT
July 30th, 2004 at 7:12 pm
i also usually hate everything that real does, but this is kinda neat. even though i’d not likely buy songs from real OR apple. cds just work better for me.
but: isnt the creation of harmony for a platform that is reastricted a process of hacking? i dont think it has a lot to to with the songs copy protection – i think apple is going to argue along the hacking line. and software IS copyright protected. reverse engineering would likely violate this copyright.
July 30th, 2004 at 7:28 pm
Yep. A truly interesting turn of events that’ll have lots of ramifications down the road, whichever way it goes.
July 30th, 2004 at 8:34 pm
Let us not forget that apple started out in the forefront of the personal computer battle. It’s foolish licensing decisions that limit the options available to there own customer that have insured the steady decline of their market share.
Apple now has a chance to kick start their ailing company and what do they do? Make the exact same mistakes they made during the personal computer wars. They’ve made their software and hardware inaccessible to other companies. These tactics failed in the personal computer wars and will force apple to loose its market share in the digital music market.
Guess they just can’t learn from their own mistakes
August 2nd, 2004 at 12:16 pm
“The DMCA comes into play when actions are taken to circumvent a measure that prevents access to copyright material. The Lexmark (International Inc.) cartridge case might be relevant here though, because in that case, reverse engineering for purposes of compatibility was found to be OK.”
In a case involving printer maker Lexmark and Static Control Components, the U.S. Copyright Office last year ruled that the DMCA does not prohibit reverse engineering if the intent is to make the duplicated product work with a separate computer program.
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So, for the purposes of compatibility it seems OK to reverse engineer. Apple should have kept its mouth shut until doing some research…again statements like theirs will only help to defang the DMCA, thankfully.
TT