Why I’m not buying from iTunes

(or any other music store) anymore. Or at least, having a hard time doing so when I can’t pirate the song or get a used CD.

As I am working on my directed study, honors senior thesis project, and taking Studies in Digital Culture, the issue of media control is ever present. I can no longer bring myself to purchase music from any source that uses Digital Rights Management or DRM. The media industry is eroding away at copyright’s original intent. By buying media with DRM, we are accepting something far greater than what we realize: an elimination of our ability to creatively build upon the creativity of others.

DRM manages the rights of the record industry, not the fair use rights protected by the Supreme Court. If you wanted to use a song purchased from an online music store for something protected by fair use, you can’t. Current DRM schemes only allow burning a CD, transferring to a portable music device, and listening on a few computers. There is no use of the music outside iTunes, Quicktime, or iLife, and even then it’s limited.

Worse, none of the DRM schemes ever expire. If you still have the file in 95 years when the music’s copyright expires, there is no self-destruct mechanism in the DRM to give you the ability to do anything you want with the music.

DRM was developed because an industry saw its customers as The Enemy. I would willingly pay $.99 to buy a song instead of using a P-2-P application. But I cannot currently buy the song without also buying DRM. DRM is like the steroids in milk. I’m not going to not buy milk, but I don’t like that there are steroids in it.

The government is doing little about this issue because the media industry is every political wallet. This sucks sooo much.

Music: A Little Less Conversation (JXL Radio Edit Remix) by Elvis Presley & JXL

This entry was posted on Monday, February 20th, 2006 at 14:14 and is tagged .

4 Responses to “Why I’m not buying from iTunes”

  1. Jeremiah Says:
    February 20th, 2006 at 15:35

    Oddly enough, a good conversation on this is going on at the O’Reilly Radar.

  2. Caleb Says:
    February 21st, 2006 at 3:18

    I buy milk without steroids. It rocks.

  3. Matt Locke Says:
    February 22nd, 2006 at 8:48

    Greetings,

    To be able to use download iTunes music as you wish, you have to drop the encoded header information. To do this, you have to transform the music to a format that does not support it. Here is how to do it, which I just successfully tested using the latest iTunes version (6.0.3)

    FIRST OF ALL MAKE SURE YOUR PREFERENCES ARE SET TO IMPORT MUSIC IN THE MP3 FORMAT, FOR OBVIOUS REASONS.

    Purchase the music, for this test it was an entire album, I just downloaded today.

    Make a new playlist, drag the new songs to the new playlist.

    Burn the playlist to CD, making sure you preferences for the Disk Format is set to “Audio CD”. You now must delete the music you paid for (scary huh?), so make sure the CD burned properly by testing it on a regular CD player.

    After you delete the music, import the Burned CD which converts it to MP3 format if your settings are set correctly.

    You have now dropped the tags that prevent you from using the music in any way you choose.

  4. Jeremiah Says:
    February 22nd, 2006 at 19:59

    Matt: This is not an adequate solution because it results in a decrease of audio quality.

    Also, you don’t need to use MP3 because MPEG-4 does not have DRM by default. MPEG-4 offers much better audio quality at the same bitrates as MP3.