Vitanuova for 2006 June 15

O tempora! O mores!

What is the world coming to when even social conservatives (and their editors) don't know how to decline in Latin?

Mr. Bauer, it should be "e pluribus plures".

In which I attempt to portray a statement as hypocritical

Cool, I got the Steve Jobs comment into BusinessWeek!

Responses to commenters:

FSF should protest against Microsoft too: They did (as the BusinessWeek article notes), at WinHEC, because of (among other things) Microsoft's "PlaysForSure" program, which is seen as a competitor to the iTunes platform. The Defective By Design campaign sees both Apple's and Microsoft's DRM as wrongful attempts to protect each company's market share at the expense not only of the other company but of end users' rights.

Record labels, not Apple, are to blame: There's a lot of blame to go around, but an Apple lawyer said publicly that Apple would not abandon FairPlay restrictions if the record labels gave it permission to do so. A music industry trade association in the U.K. has stated that Apple's use of FairPlay is a competitive problem (although it does not necessarily agree with Defective By Design that the use of DRM in general is a problem). And Apple is now actively supporting legislation that prevents people from working around these restrictions. Did the record labels require Apple to do that?

Apple competitors are hypocritical because they also create (or want to create) proprietary products that prevent interoperability: That's often the case, so we need to get in the habit of criticizing everyone for doing this and try to help the press understand (as BusinessWeek understood) that there are people whose objections run deeper than any one company's business strategy.

Users can choose other products: That's the main thing that the Defective By Design protest was encouraging people to do. The most common position among protestors is not necessarily that there should be an antitrust investigation of Apple, but that users should stop feeling sympathetic to Apple's business strategy and that the law should stop protecting it by threatening technologies that create interoperability.

Apple was legally required to use DRM: The use of DRM is mostly an industry habit and a cultural problem, not a law; DRM-less devices are mostly protected (and we need help to keep them that way). There are on-line music stores that don't use any DRM at all. It will be progress when users value the freedom (and platform competition) that these stores provide.

FairPlay is necessary or useful to stop iTunes content from appearing on file-sharing networks: According to Eric Garland, who monitors file-sharing networks for a living, every song in the iTunes music store -- including iTunes exclusive releases -- is immediately available in file-sharing networks. FairPlay is a complete failure in preventing iTunes Music Store songs from being shared in file-sharing networks -- and the "burn to CD" feature guarantees that it will continue to be. If the music industry wanted Apple to try to prevent people from sharing songs in P2P networks, it would need to start by objecting to "burn to CD". FairPlay has a much greater effect on paying music customers' decisions about what portable music player and operating system to use than it does on the availability of infringing copies of songs in file-sharing networks. And since Apple said it wouldn't drop FairPlay even if the labels agreed, it looks like FairPlay was designed that way; Apple is laughing all the way to the bank when someone repeats the theory that FairPlay is "necessary for content protection". More like platform protection.

The Microsoft alternative is worse: The Free Software Foundation -- which organized the Defective By Design campaign -- is certainly not promoting Microsoft or any of Microsoft's products as an alternative to Apple's. And they're certainly not being paid by Microsoft to criticize DRM! Although this campaign is focused on the problem of DRM in general, anyone who assumes that criticism of Microsoft means "use Apple" or criticism of Apple means "use Microsoft" has gone astray. Indeed, the assumption that Microsoft's DRM is the same kind of problem as Apple's is what led Defective By Design to launch its first protest at Microsoft's WinHEC conference.

In a sense, the fame of the "Mac/PC" platform rivalry -- just like the "Democrat/Republican" rivalry -- is an obstacle to learning about new issues. If anyone criticizes Apple for labor issues (as a recent article did) or Microsoft for using digital rights management, the prominence of "Mac vs. PC" makes the general public assume that the critic wants everyone to switch to "the other platform". This also makes it easier to dismiss a critic of anything as an opportunistic proponent of "the other side" (even in cases where the critic supports a third alternative or no particular alternative at all). Thus any critic of a Democrat can be dismissed by Democrats as a "Republican" and any critic of a Republican can be dismissed by Republicans as a "Democrat". This particular protest campaign was organized by advocates of free software (if you like, of "Linux"), but Robert Green Ingersoll properly said that "[t]he destroyer of weeds, thistles, and thorns is a benefactor whether he soweth grain or not." In my office at EFF we have a lot of Mac users who are quite attached to what Apple has accomplished, but who think that Steve Jobs is doing wrong by users with FairPlay.

Perhaps our culture would do well to give more respect to would-be "destroyer[s] of weeds, thistles, and thorns" without presuming that they are selling something, or even that they have an alternative in mind at all. Certainly all kinds of advocates want to be able to point out problems with existing business practices, even if they don't know an alternative that they would rather you buy.