3. The Great Ipod Scam: You Mean All I Get Is A Crippled Disk File

[More Twilight Zone music; fade to Gerber in another "Who Designed This Crap?" rant.]

"In the name of 'The Big Bopper' is this all I get for 99 cents, a bucket of bits in handcuffs? Who designed this crap?"

If you're underage, please cover your ears. "Digital Rights Management" will be referred to as DRM from here forward. OK, you can uncover your ears. I never understood why there are only seven words you can't say over the airwaves. There are so many more classics like, well, "DRM."

It's not that I'm against paying the piper to use digital media. It's just that it's not easy to understand a particular vendor's DRM policy and, worse, once you buy a bucket of bits in handcuffs, nothing stops the vendor or its suppliers from adding more handcuffs or anything else they want by changing DRM policies for what you already own.

Apple calls the DRM scheme it uses "FairPlay." To avoid assigning any undeserved cache to this rather biased term, let's call it "Fairplay." Here are the basics of Fairplay. All of the songs you download from Itunes are stored on your computer in encrypted format. Songs can be stored and played on as many Ipods as you wish. You can also play a song with Itunes, rip a CD containing Itune songs and play the CD on any computer or component CD player.

That's all niceness. Now comes the "Who Designed This Crap" part. You can store and use Itune songs on no more than 5 authorized computers at any one time. This is not a softball on-your-honor kind of thing. Authorization is done over the Internet using your Itunes account. There's more. You can't rip a copy of an Itunes created CD using standard CD burning programs. And, and this is a big AND, you can't make more than one copy of an Itunes song to a CD using Itunes.

That's too many handcuffs for me. Gone are pre-Itunes rights to store songs on as many computers as you want and to burn as many copies of a commercial CD as your little heart desires. And, here's the real nasty thing about Itunes DRM. If music vendors or Apple decide to put further restrictions on your use of the songs you've already downloaded, such as by allowing no copies to CD, there's nothing legal you can do about it.

CORRECTIONS TO THE LAST TWO PARAGRAPHS ABOVE BASED ON READER FEEDBACK AND TESTS (04/05/06):

What I say here is based on using Itunes 6.0.4.2, the most current version at this writing.

I was wrong about ripping a copy of an Itunes CD, but not in the way you might think. I use Nero 6.6.0.18 to burn CDs on my PC. When I tried to copy a CD with Itunes purchased songs on it and put the copied CD in a drive nothing happened. I clicked on the CD in Windows Explorer and got the error "D:\is not accessible. Incorrect function." The CD was unusable. Today I tried to copy a commercial CD and got the same error. Both the Itunes produced and commercial CD were copyrighted. This version of Nero won't copy a copyrighted CD, any copyrighted CD. Older versions did. I'm sure there are programs that will copy copyrighted CDs, but I guess that is now "illegal."

Using Itunes, I tried to burn to a CD a song purchased on 04/03/06. In my tests, I burned the song to CD and then tried to burn another right away. "Burn Playlist to CD" was grayed out on the File menu (PC). I reopened Itunes several times and "Burn Playlist to CD" was still grayed out. I assumed I couldn't burn the song to another CD. As I discovered on retrying the whole burn process today, it turns out that you aren't offered a chance to burn the playlist if any already burned CD is in the CD burner, no matter how many times you open Itunes or eject and reinsert the CD while Itunes isn't running. If you eject the burned CD, the item is no longer grayed out. But if, while in Itunes, you eject the CD and immediately close the CD tray with the burned CD in it, you're asked in a dialog box if you want to burn the playlist to the CD, even if the CD has been closed to additional writing. If you elect to write the song, Itunes goes through the motions of writing the song, but doesn't. Right now, you can burn a playlist to a CD up to seven times and then you can make another, even identical playlist, and burn it to a CD seven times. You can apparently do this ad infinitum. I apologize for the error in the original story. I do however think that it is a design flaw that Itunes grays out the burn option just because a disk with an already burned playlist on it is in the CD drive. It is also a design flaw that Itunes pays no attention to whether the CD is writable or not. Perhaps this is an operating system flaw, perhaps not.

Some have sent feedback saying that your rights to a song downloaded from Itunes are based on the license in affect at the time you buy the music. The license version is built into the song. That seems reasonable, but things change and there's no guarantee that a particular license version will govern in the future. For example, I have CDs that I bought several years ago, when it was "legal" to make copies for personal use. Nero won't copy any copyrighted CD no matter when I bought it. As I said above, it used to. Sure it would be difficult to figure out when a particular CD was purchased, but that doesn't change the fact the "license" for a two or three year old CD is being "violated."

All of this doesn't change my opinion that Itunes DRM is a serious design flaw. Of course other legal music download sites also have DRM systems, but they're not as visible as Apple and I would have expected the company that designs "for the rest of us" to fight to protect all of the rights we had in the past and in fact still have today. For example, you are supposed to be able to backup copyrighted material for personal use to any media you want as many times as you want. Illegality comes in when you use those copies for commercial purposes, like selling bootleg CDs. DRM has made that right moot.

END CORRECTIONS(04/05/06):

Please don't tell me about illegal programs to crack Itune's DRM shell. The illegality doesn't bother me all that much. The nasty part is that most of those who download content from Itunes know nothing of DRM itself, let alone cracking it.

I'm sure all those zombies in my nightmare are more than happy to have you handcuffed by DRM. It maximizes their incomes and does nothing to give you even the basic rights you have with other media. "Is that too cynical a view?" he said once more, a slight smile playing across his lips.