Despite a trend of declining sales, the iPod has been in the news again this week as Apple defends itself against a class action suit over antitrust issues and DRM complaints with iTunes. After emails and a video deposition from Steve Jobs resurfaced some of the late Apple co-founder’s snark, testimony from Apple SVP of Internet and Software Services Eddy Cue went into the company’s history with DRM and the iPod…
The Verge reports Cue testified that Apple was originally against implementing DRM but that it was essential in negotiating deals with the music industry, and Apple originally considering licensing its Fairplay DRM technology to other companies after it opted against using existing DRM technology:
“We thought about licensing the DRM from beginning, it was one of the things we thought was the right move that because we can expand the market and grow faster,” Cue said. “But we couldn’t find a way to do that and have it work reliably.”
According to his testimony, Cue said that the record labels were against the concept of the iTunes Music Store as they had their own digital music stores with varying DRM technologies between songs.
Defending the use of DRM with iTunes and the iPod, Cue pointed to Apple’s obligations to keep the music on its digital store secure:
“If a hack happened, we had to remedy the hack within a certain time period,” Cue explained. “We had a time to fix the problem, or they could take all their music off the store … we’d have to drop whatever we were doing and go work on those [hacks].”
Previous reporting of the antitrust case revealed that Apple deleted music purchased from other digital stores from customers’ iPods without notice.
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John Gruber’s piece is enlightening as well. Not a simple case – I had my non-iTunes bought music lost in the early days of iPod and I was super annoyed and upset. There’s 2 sides to every story though.
It seems that non-DRM music was OK and was not deleted. That will probably figure large in this case.
When the details of *how* it got on there in the first place come out, for those not old enough to remember all of this when it happened at the time, the case will very likely wind down quickly after that. The ones that should have been sued were RealNetworks for selling what they did in the first place…but this is all ancient history @ internet timescales…
I had (still have, somewhere) a wonderful Sony MP3 Player that was small, easy to use, incredibly light and stylish – and it went to the gym everyday with me. It was light years ahead of anything that Apple had released – and this was in the 2006 era – and I really appreciated everything about it . . . except the Draconian software that Sony “required” you to use to load music on the player. It was such a kludge and so filled with their proprietary DRM that using it was such a PITA! And, after all Sony was in both the music distribution and hardware business – so they had to protect their extremely vested interest (remember their DRM on CD’s that got them fined multi-millions of $$$$) in being both “content Owner and Distributor.” It’s what finally made me “downgrade” to the iPod family.
The Apple hardware still isn’t as nice as that Sony player (It had an FM Radio Tuner built in as well) but I can live with iTunes.
Sony finally shut those players down by killing the software – Now there’s a lawsuit!