IPOD is propriety / French Laws
‘The lower house of the French legislature on Tuesday passed a bill that would force Apple to make its downloads work on all digital music players and not just on the iconic iPod.’
The proprietary, DRM-ed format is the reason I don’t and will never own an ipod.
Apple should be able to do what it wants though. The consumer should dictate the ‘law’ to apple. Unfortunately most don’t care and fall for big-marketing. If that is what consumers will accept then thats what they will get. No law should get in the way. The law should only keep the corporations straight and honest and for the consumer to be well informed given at least mild to moderate effort (dending on complexity).
If apple leaves, I don’t care. Bad for the french economy (open format is better than proprietary which is better than niether), but Piracy willl make sure that any opressive law becomes unattractive. Movie and Game Rating age restrictions, outright bans, and red-tape for business. Piracy will satisfy demand if commerce cannot. I very much do prefer the people-centric distributed libertarian-socialist environment of filesharing. Communism is state-centric centralized authoritarian socialism, so downloading from P2P is not supporting communism. Perhaps FileSharing will become Everything-Sharing in 200-300 years with nanofacs or replicators (trek) though.
I buy CDs for my favorites but I download far more than I could ever afford. My ‘legal’ MP3s are mostly self-ripped so I can have my own custom-chosen and consistent bit-rate and other settings.
