What Fresh Idiocy Is This?

Today’s dose of “teh stoopid” comes to us cour­tesy of The Apple Blog in this won­der­ful gem of idiocy from Bob Rudis titled iTunes Store and Apple’s DRM Safe Haven In Jeopardy. I have nei­ther the time, nor the energy to prop­erly dis­ect this gem; but it breaks down like this. Apple recently com­mented that the rate hikes on dig­i­tal down­loads being pro­posed by the Copyright Royalty Board could make it shut down the iTunes Store. For those with ter­mi­nal brain dys­func­tion, this is what we call a “bluff.” Bob com­bines this fact with the fact that Walmart, that paragon of con­sumer activism recently shut down its wildly suc­cess­ful online music store; and in the process of doing so told it’s cus­tomers to pound sand.

From these two events, related tan­gen­tially at best, Bob then extrap­o­lates a dystopian future where Apple shut­ters iTunes and leaves its cus­tomers in the lurch. Of course, this leads us to Bob’s heroic cry to the com­mon man to rise up against the shack­les of FairPlay and ask, nay, demand that Apple vio­late their con­tracts with the music indus­try and remove FairPlay now.

It’s really too bad that Apple, in its usual secre­tive man­ner has never com­mented on DRM … oh, wait.

… Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licens­able for­mats. In such a world, any player can play music pur­chased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all play­ers. This is clearly the best alter­na­tive for con­sumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heart­beat. If the big four music com­pa­nies would license Apple their music with­out the require­ment that it be pro­tected with a DRM, we would switch to sell­ing only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Imagine that world indeed.