Official Ares Free Download

Apple’s announcement, following in the wake of a number of further announcements by the technology giant in a similar vein, that it would offer DRM-protected music downloads from it online iTunes shop that could be transferred as ringtones to your phone, cause a stir. Not because this was a massive technological step, nor because it was a novel approach by an online vendor, but because it is actually taking away from current users something that has been done for quite some time.

Couched as a new ‘feature’ of the downloads service, users will now be required to pay an extra dollar so that Apple will allow the DRM-protected tracks to be transferred to phones. There are a number of well established software tools that have facilitated this conversion in the past, but the DRM protection will most likely halt this process.
Derek Slater of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), quoted in p2pnet.net notes the apparently unfairness of this decision:

Apple will only let you convert those tracks to ringtones if you pay another dollar, and, just as you can only move iTunes DRM restricted tracks to the iPod and not other portable players, these ringtones only work on the iPhone. If you’d rather create your own ringtone using a tool like iToner, too bad — the DRM won’t let you, and circumventing the lock could violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

And he’s got a point. It smells very much like blatant Apple profiteering (at the expense of its very loyal customer base) wrapped up in an attempt to champion ‘legitimate’ DRM protected music. The big question is why we should now pay extra for something that we’ve done before for free. Is this taking copyright laws to an even more rediculous level?

While we’ll be the first to admit that there are sound reasons to protect the copyright of certain intellectual property, there has to be a logical limit; should I start to charge for sharing with you ideas that I had this morning over breakfast? Is a ringtone really violating an artist’s IP?

Whatever the answer to these questions, Apple’s quick decision to nip this in the bud will either make it some extra money or will start to make its ‘loyal’ customer base feel very slightly jaded. How far can Apple push its fans?

Related Articles

 Enjoyed this? Subscribe to the feed.