You Can't Really Blame Norway For Declaring iTunes Illegal
The Australian ITWire reports:
A report from MSNBC and the Financial Times says that Norway is the first country to make iTunes illegal because the songs it sells can’t be played on other mp3 players.
Now, the particular writer here decides to lambast the lawsuit:
In what is obviously one of the dumbest decisions of all time, Norway has declared that iTunes is illegal because songs sold on iTunes can’t be played on other mp3 player.While I wish that iTunes would work with any mp3 player, I also wish that Blu-ray discs would work in existing DVD players and HD DVD players. I also wish I could use Gilette blades in Shick razors, and I wish I could legally run Mac OS X on my PC.
It’s also be nice to have a GSM phone running on a CDMA network, Nintendo Wii games playing on a PS3 and an Xbox 360, and it’d be nice if I could use much cheaper liquefied natural gas in my petrol/gasoline or diesel engine without needing any modifications.
While we’re at it, why doesn’t government mandate that all coins be exactly the same size, so you could use them in any vending machine anywhere in the world? Heck, why not make the Zune store sell songs that can be played on any mp3 player, too?
I’m equally annoyed that games I buy for the PSP can only be played on a PSP. It’d be nice to pop them into my Nintendo DS, and vice versa. And surely the decision to release songs on the CD format discriminated against anyone owning an audio cassette player. I mean, where was the Government action then? How dare music companies release music in a format that, at the time, couldn’t be played on the vast majority of the world’s music players?
Et cetera, et cetera.
I am going to take a completely different approach. You can't blame Norway for wanting to do this.
And here's why you can't blame the Norwegians: what are they trying to do? Create a level playing field.
A proprietary format (and the coin thing, the PSP thing, none of these are valid parallels) on a uniform media means that MP3-Players-R-Us will never be able to cater to the clientele you have earmarked for yourself. The more artists which release songs on iTunes (and many do exclusively, due to its ease of use) means the more people who will have to endure either a steep learning curve to learn how to use (potentially illegal) audio converters or else go without until a CD comes out, at which time, of course, they've gotten other mp3s and/or forgotten about the artist.
Imagine, for instance, that System of A Down or Talib Kweli's CD wouldn't play in your CD player, but it would play in an Apple CD player. However, Pantera's and Mos Def's CD would. Why would this be cool?
While I'm not saying I agree with the lawsuit -- let the people buy what they want (same with the iPhone) -- can you blame them? This doesn't even resemble a potential monopoly?
Comments
Something from the European rumor mill: Nintendo is going to set a conversion rate of 4:1 for Star points to Wii points according to German mag:
go now
Posted by: piap | February 2, 2007 03:48 PM