Fairplay Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Apple founders film released as DRM-free download

by Erica Sadun (Feb 26th, 2007)

TUAW reader Steve pointed us to this article about "In Search of Silicon Valley". It's a film about a trio (Steve O'Hear, Fleeta Siegel and Selwyn George) who travels from London to Silicon Valley, tracks down Apple pioneers Woz, Hertzfeld, Raskin, and Kawasaki as well as other net luminaries like ...

Microsoft DRM means no BitTorrent Media for OS X

by Erica Sadun (Feb 26th, 2007)

BitTorrent is opening up a new site that's going to sell TV shows and movies in direct competition to iTunes. But... Engadget reveals that the new BitTorrent Entertainment Network plans to use Microsoft DRM to protect its TV shows and movies, making it a pretty good bet that OS X users will not be ...

Cory Doctorow on Steve's 'Thoughts on Music'

by Scott McNulty (Feb 23rd, 2007)

We all know that Cory Doctorow, of BoingBoing fame, hates DRM with the red hot passion of a thousand suns. Most people aren't fans of DRM, but view it as a necessary evil in a world where it is very easy for one person to copy and distribute your 'product' without one red cent going into your ...

Macrovision responds to Steve

by Erica Sadun (Feb 19th, 2007)

Fred Amoroso, president and CEO of Macrovision, has posted a public response to Steve Job's recent open letter on DRM. Amoroso[1] argues that DRM is of net-benefit to the consumer. It allows consumers to rent intellectual property, such as video, software and games as well as music, without having ...

Warner Music Group Head defends DRM

by Erica Sadun (Feb 14th, 2007)

Edgar Bronfman Jr, chairman and CEO of Warner Music Group, thinks DRM is a good thing (though that article does get his name wrong). It protects intellectual property. He doesn't think, however, that DRM should limit listeners to a single device, instead he believes in "interoperability". In a ...

RIAA: Open up FairPlay to competitors

by Erica Sadun (Feb 8th, 2007)

The RIAA doesn't want to drop DRM. It wants Apple to license FairPlay to competitors. In this Globe and Mail story, Mitch Bainwol, chief RIAA dude, says that licensing FairPlay to other manufacturers would allow iTunes purchases to be played on other devices. This move would, presumably, keep ...

DRM + iPhone = eeEEEeee-vil says NYT

by Michael Rose (Jan 15th, 2007)

I spent some of my lazy holiday Monday pondering an appropriate response to Randall Stross's article (not clearly billed as either news or opinion) in Sunday's New York Times entitled Want an iPhone? Beware the iHandcuffs, a fairly... odd interweaving of gripes about the 'lock-in' factor of the ...

FairPlay for sale, and not by Apple

by Scott McNulty (Oct 2nd, 2006)

You may know Jon Lech Johansen as 'DVD Jon,' a name he acquired after he wrote DeCSS, which unscrambles the content on DVDs to make copying possible. He isn't a fan of DRM, as you can imagine, and has set his sights on Apple in the past. He has reverse engineered a previous version ofFairPlay, ...

FairPlay: coming to a classroom near you?

by Jay Savage (Sep 23rd, 2006)

We haven't talked about iTunes U here in a while, but it's been on my mind lately, as I'm heading up my U's roll-out. It's a long, tortuous process--because of our internal bureaucracy, not Apple's--but, despite the fact I haven't been talking to our official reps (the extent of those conversations ...

iTunes 7 supports 'reverse syncing'

by Scott McNulty (Sep 12th, 2006)

iTunes 7 introduces a new feature called 'reverse syncing.' What's that all about? Well, let's say you have two Macs; one at home and one at work. You have all your music on your home Mac, but you sure would like to get it onto your work computer. Past iterations of iPod/iTunes would only allow you ...

No, AAC isn't 'Apple's format', but

by David Chartier (May 12th, 2006)

John Gruber pointed to a post at the Ars Technica journals by Ken Fisher (their editor-in-chief) in which he reminds everyone that AAC isn't 'Apple's format'. This is in response to all the recent buzz and speculation of Sony's announcement of AAC support; it appears that many took this as some sort ...