Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
If a user has downloaded a few hundred iTunes tracks at a cost of
hundreds of dollars and decides that he wants to swap his ageing iPod
for an iRiver, a Creative Zen or a Sandisk Sansa, Apple and the law as
it stands says he can't. To be sure, there are ways around this but
they're not legal.
The DRM laws have become so ridiculously
slanted against the consumer that Microsoft is incredibly now going to
introduce a second DRM for its upcoming Zune player, which will not be
compatible with its own PlaysForSure.
It is quite understandable that companies like Apple and Microsoft want
to create and protect their markets. Apple in particular has done a lot
to foster the growth of legal digital downloads. Most would agree that
iTunes is a great service and the iPod is a great portable player.
However, the notion that iPod's sales and market domination depend
entirely on the iTunes connection is probably invalid. Most iPod owners
have hundreds if not thousands of tracks on their players. Yet sales
statistics tell us that on average, each of the 60 million plus iPods
in the marketplace has only 20 tracks purchased through iTunes.
iTunes probably aids iPod sales more through promotion than DRM lock-in.
Governments in Europe, led by France and the Scandinavian countries
have now begun to dig in their heels and say enough is enough. They
have targeted Apple and Microsoft is likely to be next. Limiting
consumer choice is not what free enterprise is supposed to be about and
that is exactly what DRM attempts to do.
As for the Microsoft lawsuit against the FairUse4WM developers, the
best thing the case could do is highlight the DRM issue in the public
arena and motivate lawmakers to rethink current laws and make
FairUse4WM redundant.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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