published an interesting piece called How FairPlay Works: Apple’s iTunes DRM Dilemma at the end of February. It’s a must-read in the context of the very open Apple-DRM file. At the bottom of the article there are links to several other interesting pieces as well. Well worth your time.
A thinker whose work I struggled with
Paul Wells is a great blogger
as well as a great columnist, but unfortunately when Macleans re-launched his blog, Inkless Wells, in a new blogging system that has been integrated with the rest of the magazine’s site, they forgot to turn on the RSS feeds. They still use RSS, but not on a blog-by-blog basis, which betrays a deep lack of understanding of the weblog format and may hurt him and the rest of Macleans’ bloggers. No matter how great Wells is, I won’t monitor an over-large RSS feed just to get my attention that he’s posted something. And, for me, no RSS means that he won’t get my attention. Macleans now has to hope that I remember to check in, despite the fact that I have almost a hundred other media outlets that ARE competing for my attention via feeds and so are almost sure to have it first. I hope they fix this soon – though it has already been a month, so I’m not holding my breath.
Update: I just got an email from Sheldon Sawchuk, the General Manager of Macleans.ca, and they have turned on the feeds for Macleans’ blogs. Good news! I’m happy to be subscribed again. [Update March 6, 2007]
Why oh Why can’t
Apple Mail allow me to navigate with the arrow keys the way NetNewsWire does? The relationship between the feeds pane and each feed’s posts in NNW is so fast and intuitive; whereas there seems to be no relationship between the mailboxes pane and the message panes in Apple Mail.
Daring Fireball’s John Gruber
asks an important question: Would Apple Mix DRM and Non-DRM Music at the iTunes Store? and refers to longtime Mac developer Peter N Lewis, whose blog post about Why Apple Cannot Allow DRM-free Indie Music is a worthwhile read as well. Lewis covers ground that I covered in my initial post about Jobs’ letter and reaches the same conclusion that I did. However, I think Gruber makes (as usual) some very valid arguments, in particular pointing out that there are interface conventions available in iTunes that make it possible that ITMS could stock non-DRM songs alongside DRM songs without causing too much confusion.
Compare and contrast these views with Cory Doctorow’s analysis, presented in an article in Salon today. Doctorow (who is a friend of a friend and someone whose views I tend to agree with) doubts Jobs’ sincerity and simply doesn’t believe that the DRM hasn’t given Apple the lock-in as Jobs suggested. I disagree with Doctorow that Apple is an eager DRM advocate – I think the evidence is pretty clear that they were overly cautious at the beginning (and so were more pro-DRM in the past) and now they’re only very grudging supporters.
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