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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Sunday, September 2, 2007
11:13 - Woulda got away with it, too, if it weren't for you meddling kids
http://daringfireball.net/2007/09/nbc_screw_up

(top)
My feeling on this whole NBC-pulling-out-of-iTunes thing is that the NBC execs in question simply have no understanding of how the world of digital content works.

In addition, we asked Apple to take concrete steps to protect content from piracy, since it is estimated that the typical iPod contains a significant amount of illegally downloaded material.

I suspect that they believe the "illegally downloaded material" found on so many iPods comes from cracked DRM'd iTunes downloads. They probably think Apple's DRM just sucks, and that's the only reason why there are pirated versions of The Office floating around the tubes.

Gruber says:

I’d love to hear more about exactly what NBC wants Apple to do, but the only two things I can think of are (a) disallowing iPods and iPhones from playing anything other than DRM-protected video; and (b) adding spyware features to iTunes to search for and attempt to identify bootleg video files on users’ computers. Needless to say, it’s no wonder Apple told them to go fuck themselves.

I think it may be simpler than that. Somehow I have the idea that NBC's take on the situation is much less nuanced than "We wish Apple would use its market penetration clout to help stem the tide of piracy by making iTunes go out and zap non-DRM'd MP3s on people's hard drives (has NBC discussed this with EMI?). I think it comes down to a simple pigheaded misunderstanding—NBC probably thinks the continued presence of bootleg material on the Net is primarily a result of Apple not taking this whole DRM thing seriously enough to make FairPlay really bulletproof. It doesn't occur to them that so much of the illegal content out there comes from sources that are free and higher-definition than iTunes—e.g. DVD ripping and TiVo—that it has made it a pointless endeavor for anyone to even bother cracking FairPlay. I mean, yeah, people have done it, but has anyone heard about those great emancipators of the thralls of iTunes since then? I sure haven't.

I don't think NBC gets the fact that all it takes is one person with a DVD and a copy of HandBrake to put a high-fidelity, DRM-free piece of video content on BitTorrent. I think NBC has the idea that the amount of pirated material from a given source or medium depends not just on the ease with which it's liberated from that medium, but on the number of people doing it. They probably can't shake the nagging feeling that everybody downloading from iTunes is only doing so in order to crack the DRM and upload their content (because, y'know, it's already an icky digital file on the Internet, not one of those nice safe disc things you just put in a DVD player, right? An iTunes file is much closer to being a piece of contraband than a DVD is, right?). They probably would be incredulous at the idea that DVD ripping is actually far easier than cracking an iTunes file, and has more reward (better quality)—and that once one person has done it (well), nobody else is likely to do it again anyway, because the files replicate without bound and can't be removed from the wires.

Like the guy who wrote the Open Letter to NBC, I'm happy with boycotting NBC's content over this. But I can't help but think that it isn't just Apple cranks who will feel the same. Who will honestly come down on NBC's side here? Are people really clamoring for NBC's shows to appear in flexible-price packages, "in ways that could make our content even more attractive for consumers"? Who does that fool? It doesn't take much to drive someone to the DVD racks instead of iTunes. People are willing to pay a premium for lower-quality iTunes content just for the convenience, but not if the prices change appreciably (and yeah, I'll bet NBC wanted to lower prices; pull the other one). Fans of The Office and Battlestar Galactica—who are not Apple fans too—will simply buy DVDs and play those instead of streaming them through their Apple TVs; and they'll just do without having those shows on their iPods. And those are the consumers who would have potentially been most charitable toward NBC in this maneuver. To everyone else, well... this all looks pretty one-sided.

What I find most fascinating about all these recent developments, though, is seeing the various content distributors breaking ranks right and left. EMI starts selling DRM-free music; Universal and NBC pull out of iTunes because they don't get variable pricing like Microsoft gives them. The cartels aren't voting as a bloc anymore. Different companies are on different tracks pointing in different directions. They're not all interchangeable monoliths anymore. The pieces are in motion; in a few years we'll be able to see which of the labels and networks are succeeding in the market and in the court of public opinion, and which ones are regretting the decisions they made.

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© Brian Tiemann