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iTunes Conference Call
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Oh... its so typical of you to always look for a class action suit at the first 'problem'... Lawers, rejoice!
By putting the CD burning limit from 10 to 7 Apple doesnt change anything about the music you already own. ITS THE PLAYER that changed! IF you dont agree with the change, just stay with iTunes 4 and no prob.
On the other end, I agree that changing policy like this sucks. They should only be allowed to change it if it improve the customer satisfaction not because of the majors.
By putting the CD burning limit from 10 to 7 Apple doesnt change anything about the music you already own. ITS THE PLAYER that changed! IF you dont agree with the change, just stay with iTunes 4 and no prob.
On the other end, I agree that changing policy like this sucks. They should only be allowed to change it if it improve the customer satisfaction not because of the majors.
Is sharing on five computers worth burning 7 playlists? I wonder. if you make a great mix and want to give it to all your friends, you could run into the 7 limit, but I would be more likely to run into the limit by sharing the files directly with friends.
Thank GOD for the .99 staying the same, though. Man I'm glad for that one.
Other than that, sounds like I nice little bundle of news, not spectacular, but not shabby in the least, either.
Thank GOD for the .99 staying the same, though. Man I'm glad for that one.
Other than that, sounds like I nice little bundle of news, not spectacular, but not shabby in the least, either.
iMeowbot
macrumors G3
nagromme said:
Scratches and sun damage, mostly. I'm extraordinarily cruel to my CDs! It's a succession of replacements, not multiple copies at once. I tend to leave them loose in the console, fiddling with cases doesn't work so well on the highway. Changers aren't really an option for rentals, etc.
It's a heck of a lot more convenient to burn straight from the iTunes library, than to grab a CD from the stacks and re-rip it every time.
idkew said:
Nope - you're the one that's wrong. Conditions of sale can change, sure - on new purchases from the store. I have no problem if they are creating FairPlay DRM rights 1.1, which applies to new purchases.
But if they are telling me that terms of sale change regarding previously made purchases, than we're all heading into a brave new world here. I'm almost positive this is a violation of contract law.
To those who say that I'm too eager to have lawyers jump in, guess what - I'm an engineer, and by rights despise lawyers. But trust me - these media companies that we "purchase" this content from have lawyers up the wazoo, there to help these companies clamp down continuously on reasonable usage rights.
I hope that this does not require a court fight, but shifting the licensing restrictions on previously purchased goods is a concept that must be nipped in the bud.
iMeowbot
macrumors G3
dontmatter said:
If you're making a batch of CDs all at once like that, you could burn just one from iTunes and then use a general-purpose CDDA copy program to do the rest. With the new lossless codec, I suppose you could import from the first CD back into iTunes and burn from those rips.
stoid said:
Can you really do that? (and who has five computers anyway?)
Still don't know what I think about the retroactivness though... sure, you don't have to sign the new agreement, but..... you're kinda forced into it (I presume you have to sign it to downoad more music from ituens). I would want to, as the five computer thing is more important than the 7 CD thing for me, but I don't like the principal of them changing it for the music you already bought, even if you don't HAVE to accept the change.
idkew
macrumors 68020
Exponent said:
i have tried to find the agreement we agreed to when we installed 4.5...
but, it does not say one way or the other, the text i quoted was fairly ambiguous about if it can changed the rights to already licensed songs. it would not be a violation if we agreed to it when we purchased the music. i am guessing apple has you agreed to that when you sign up for the iTMS... but i can't find my license.
found it:
so- in other words. apple has you by the balls. they can change the license as they see fit, and cancel the iTMS whenever they like, and you can never listen to your songs again. All legal.
idkew said:
No, if the iTMS is ever cancelled it wouldn't keep you from still being able to play all of the songs you currently have. You could simply just burn them all once to audio CDs and you're done. You could do with them whatever you want from there.
idkew said:
Granted, but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for that to happen anytime soon. 🙄
Mantat said:
I loathe this sort of comment. The average salary for lawyers in the US is only $40,000. Only 7% of American lawyers ever set foot in a courtroom. Our job, most of the time, is to help people and institutions better understand the law so that they are fully cognizant of their rights and obligations under it. In other words, the legal system tries (and tries hard) to minimize the number of suits and disputes. This is a fundamental part of civil procedure classes, and every lawyer I know makes an affirmative effort to avoid disputes and lawsuits when possible.
The class action device is a limited exception to the above, for one simple reason: most class actions are issues that affect numerous people, but where the injury to each particular plaintiff is small enough that that person would be unlikely to assert his rights in the absence of the class action device. And because of the potential for abuse, an attorney prosecuting a class action lawsuit has to overcome enormous procedural obstacles to even have the class certified. (All this is before a trial would ever take place, and most of the time it is all done at the expense of the plaintiff's law firm itself. (Yet another safeguard against a frivolous action.))
In this case, those upgrading to iTunes 4.5 execute a new contract, so there's likely nothing to contest, even if someone wanted to. (That's thanks to the work of lawyers, not in spite of it.) Given that Apple was able to get something many people were clamoring for (use of purchased songs on more machines), and traded something most people never used, it's likely that they had to renegotiate their agreement with the record companies to do it. Painting this as a loss to consumers seems silly to me.
elo
Music rights...
I find it funny that as the digital age expands, our expectations of what is "ours" and what we can do with "our" stuff increases exponentially. Just 10 years ago, if you bought a CD you had rights to that CD. You couldn't back it up other than making a tape copy - no one did that. If your friend wanted a copy, you made them a tape, but that was in real time so they had to be a really good friend. Otherwise you told them to go get their own. If you wanted to listen to that music at work, you took that CD to work. To listen in the car, you took that CD with you in the car. If, God forbid, you got a scratch on that CD and it became unreadable....you had to go buy another one if you wanted to listen to that music again. And you couldn't ask for a free replacement since you already owned that music.
Now we act like DRM is the worst thing in the world, yet even with DRM we have much more flexibility than we did in the "old" days. We can make exact copies - 7 now, we can have "our" music playing on 5 different computers at the same time, we can stream it from one place to the other, we can save it on as many iPods as we want, we can purchase it without leaving the house, we can instantly share it with all our friends and even strangers. And yet we still worry because they change it after a year and now we can only get 7 burns but we can now have it on 5 computers and omg what happens if the ITMS goes under....No matter what rights they put on it, it will never be as restrictive as it was just 10 years ago. And even if ITMS goes under, as long as we have backed up our music, we don't have to worry about losing our music. Things are only getting better - let's keep it in perspective.
I find it funny that as the digital age expands, our expectations of what is "ours" and what we can do with "our" stuff increases exponentially. Just 10 years ago, if you bought a CD you had rights to that CD. You couldn't back it up other than making a tape copy - no one did that. If your friend wanted a copy, you made them a tape, but that was in real time so they had to be a really good friend. Otherwise you told them to go get their own. If you wanted to listen to that music at work, you took that CD to work. To listen in the car, you took that CD with you in the car. If, God forbid, you got a scratch on that CD and it became unreadable....you had to go buy another one if you wanted to listen to that music again. And you couldn't ask for a free replacement since you already owned that music.
Now we act like DRM is the worst thing in the world, yet even with DRM we have much more flexibility than we did in the "old" days. We can make exact copies - 7 now, we can have "our" music playing on 5 different computers at the same time, we can stream it from one place to the other, we can save it on as many iPods as we want, we can purchase it without leaving the house, we can instantly share it with all our friends and even strangers. And yet we still worry because they change it after a year and now we can only get 7 burns but we can now have it on 5 computers and omg what happens if the ITMS goes under....No matter what rights they put on it, it will never be as restrictive as it was just 10 years ago. And even if ITMS goes under, as long as we have backed up our music, we don't have to worry about losing our music. Things are only getting better - let's keep it in perspective.
sushi
Moderator emeritus
I believe that you are licensing to use the music rather than purchasing the music itself.Exponent said:
AFAIK, a licence can change at anytime. You have the choice of accepting the change, or not. By installing the iTunes upgrade you have agreed to the change. No one is forcing you to upgrade.
Sushi
EDIT: Spelling
nagromme
macrumors G5
Apple could pull the plug on iTMS totally and your purchases will still play, and still be burnable losslessly and without DRM, making them universally playable forever.
Your computer doesn't check in with Apple to play a song, nor to burn it. If Apple were to make some kind of update that deletes or disable everyone's music (do we really fear that?) then you'd just opt out of the update, or burn to CD (or other backup method) before doing the update.
That's why iTunes is better than the music rental services. They can and DO disable your downloads when you stop your recurring payment.
Your computer doesn't check in with Apple to play a song, nor to burn it. If Apple were to make some kind of update that deletes or disable everyone's music (do we really fear that?) then you'd just opt out of the update, or burn to CD (or other backup method) before doing the update.
That's why iTunes is better than the music rental services. They can and DO disable your downloads when you stop your recurring payment.
Snowy_River
macrumors 68030
nagromme said:
Well, as my own experiences have shown, it is quite possible for you computer to become de-authorized, and then, if Apple's iTMS servers aren't around for your computer to check in with, you can't play your music any more. Also, if you burn them to a CD, yes, that CD still has the original quality, but if you rip them back onto your computer you lose quality. So, we do have to hope that Apple keeps their iTMS servers up, even if iTMS goes under. Either that, or we have to keep our eyes out for things like PlayFair to allow us to 'unwrap' the DRM off our pAAC files so they can be played even if the iTMS servers are gone...
nagromme said:
You didn't get it.
If you live in, say, Tucson, AZ, and have the silly habit of leaving your dye-based (CD-R) CDs in your car stereo, you will tend to find that such CDs become unplayable after a few weeks of the summer heat (on average; sometimes a single day's peak sun can ruin it). In that case, the average user either has to bypass the copy protections (by burning and re-ripping, or by "silent track" manipulations), or change their "perfect mix" (which is blasphemous to a large number of folks who don't "mix" at all but instead just burn the album complete and unaltered the way the band originally "intended" it), every couple of months.
Note that dye-based CD-R media has a significantly higher rate of corruption due to heat than "pressed" factory CDs. A pressed CD will last significantly longer (perhaps even neraly indefinitely) in the Arizona sun than a CD-R.
IMHO, the whole CD-burn limit deal is silly. If I wanted to make a bunch of CDs for my friends, any limit on CD burns (no matter how low) does nothing more than make me burn one CD out, then re-import the CD as lossless (compressed or not) and burn from that lossless collection of tunes. There is a very minor loss in quality here if you don't use error correction in the rip, but even that's not noticeable. And, after this one, 5-minute detour, I don't have a 7-burn or 10-burn limit, but instead an infinite burn capacity (limitted only by how many CD-R disks I can shove in to burn).
But, obviously, the "7 burns" thing was a compromise. It's not a "natural" number like "5" or "10", but rather a negotiated compromise between the two.