Not everybody is taking part of the iPod and Apple adoration. Refreshing rant by Cory Doctorow: Apple to iPod owners: “Eat shit and die”: “Cory Doctorow: If you’re an iPod user, you would have done well to have availed yourself of iPod Download, an OS X app that made it easy to move your music […]
11/01/2004 16:11:09
Not everybody is taking part of the iPod and Apple adoration. Refreshing rant by Cory Doctorow:
Apple to iPod owners: "Eat shit and die": "Cory Doctorow: If you're an iPod user, you would have done well to have availed yourself of iPod Download, an OS X app that made it easy to move your music from your iPod to your Mac. Of course, Apple hated that poor little app, so it was sometimes hard to find, as Apple devoted expensive laywer-hours to shutting down all the sites that were hosting copies of it. Of course, there's more dough where that came from — they'll just pass the cost on to you in your next iPod.
As it turns out, you're shit-outta-luck even if you managed to snag a copy. That's because Apple just devoted some expensive engineering hours to updating iTunes to version 4.7, with the "improvement" of breaking iPod Download. That's right — Apple's spending money seeing to it that features are removed from your iPod. Thanks a whole lot, Apple.
Every time I post something like this, I get a deluge of mail that makes the same tired points, so before you bother, here's some pre-rebuttal:
What's the lesson here? Well, Apple's not on your side, even if you're an Apple customer. If you buy into a proprietary platform where the music industry gets a veto, you're scr0d. Every time you buy an iPod, you are financing legal and technical countermeasures aimed at taking away legitimate features that enable you to do more with your lawfully acquired music and hardware.
Link"
(Via Boing Boing.)