p2pnet.net News Feature:- My son Max is a great fan of Godzilla and has tapes of most of the old Japanese movies from the 1950’s and 1960’s. He loves watching Godzilla batting his old enemies, like King Gidorah and Mothra, but I always get confused and have to ask which is the good monster and which the bad one.

I had the same reaction when I heard about the arguments between Apple Computers and Real Networks over Real’s new ‘Harmony’ service, which lets users buy songs from the RealPlayer Music Store and play them on an Apple iPod as well as dozens of other different portable music players.

Who exactly is the goodie here? Is it Apple, whose shiny toy has sold in the millions and provides an easy-to-use way of listening to good-quality digital music on the move?

Or is it Real, breaking down the barriers that exist between different file formats, different portable players, different online music stores and different digital rights management systems?

My usual rule here is to side with the smaller player, the one that is trying to disturb the equilibrium, challenge those who dominate the market and provide new products and services to users.

But Real managed to turn the RealPlayer that we all loved when it launched in the mid 1990’s into one of the least usable and most irritating pieces of software ever written, filled with features that nobody wanted, pushing popup ads for their paid-for service at regular intervals and generally annoying everyone.

The only reason I, and I suspect millions of other UK users, have RealPlayer installed on my computer is because it’s used all over bbc.co.uk.

Apple is no better. It sold its integrity to the record business when it agreed to pay their inflated royalties for each song sold from the iTunes Music Store and to lock them up using FairPlay, a proprietary technology which they refuse to license to anyone else.

So I feel like I’m watching Rodin and Mechagodzilla battle over who can do the most damage to Tokyo, with no good monster in sight to protect us all.

In fact, what Real are doing isn’t the great breakthrough for users of portable music players that their press office seems to be claiming. All Harmony does is convert files from one type of digital rights management (DRM) format to another, so that iPod owners can now buy a song from the RealPlayer Music Store and turn it into a file which their iPod will play. It will do the same for Windows Media DRM, and supports many portable music players, but that’s all.

It doesn’t free the music from the limitations imposed by the record companies, who will only license the songs for download if they are restricted in the ways they can be copied, shared or burned to CD. And it doesn’t get around the fact that fair use rights built into copyright law are being removed by DRM technologies.

If I buy a book or a CD I can sell it, even though I only have a license to the words or music. I can’t do the same with a downloaded music file, even though copyright law would let me, because the record companies have decided to take that freedom away from me.

There are programs around to do this, like Jon Johansen’s hymn (’hear your music anywhere’), which decrypts FairPlay protected music files and allows you to convert them to other formats and assert your fair-use rights under copyright law.

And there are open music formats like Ogg Vorbis which provide good sound quality with no DRM. Or you can use any format you want without any DRM at all if you rip your own CDs. And while the record companies don’t like unprotected music, it is not illegal to own or listen to it – it’s only unlicensed sharing and copying it that could get you into trouble.

As you might expect, Apple and Real will probably end up in court over this. Apple have already threatened legal action under the controversial US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, arguing that Real are breaking the law by interfering with the Fairplay copy protection technology they are using.

This could be a hard one to prove. Real aren’t taking the protection away from any music bought from Apple, they are just adding it to music bought from them.

But the real danger is that Apple will simply change the way that FairPlay works so that it breaks Real’s Harmony. They have already threatened this in a press release which condemned Real’s ‘hacker tactics’ and said ‘it is highly likely that Real’s Harmony technology will cease to work with current and future iPods’.

This is similar to what happened with instant messenger services, when AOL constantly changed the way AIM operated to break any third-party services that tried to interface with it.

It’s perfectly legal to do this. It’s just shabby, anti-competitive and distasteful. Apple should be ashamed if their fear of competition in the downloaded music business persuades them to resort to it.

In the Godzilla movies, the good monster probably does just as much damage as the baddie, trashing cities, causing tidal waves and scaring people, even if it’s trying to defend the humans.

And so it is with Apple and Real. Neither has a monopoly to exploit and so both choose to present themselves as friends of the people, offering us a liberation that we only need because they took away our freedoms in the past in their attempt to cosy up to the record companies.

Perhaps it’s time to uninstall RealPlayer and trade in my iPod.

Bill Thompson – andfinally.com

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This is published here under a Creative Commons License, and here’s another Bill T Special in which Thompson says, "MP3 can be made to work – it’s just so much hassle that I can’t see it’s worth it."

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 31st, 2004 at 12:14 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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