Tech Goes Boom

Much Ado About iPod

There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth over Apple killing 3rd party hacks that allow iPod users to pull tracks off their iPods and into their music libraries.

Cory Doctorow decries this as taking features away from users. I don't see how. This was never a feature offered to customers by Apple, and Apple has no obligation to make sure these 3rd party hacks will continue to work through updates. It's not a certain thing that Apple broke this hack on purpose (Update: yes they did and they didn't do a good job), but it is not terribly out of line for them to do so. They are enforcing the feature set that the ipod was shipped with.

Cory also dismisses the possibility that Apple is doing this as an obligation to the record companies saying it's too late for them to take their ball and go home at this point. While that's a debatable issue, he doesn't raise the possibility of contractual obligations that could possibly fine Apple or limit their selection of available music from each label. There are plenty of ways the industry could punish Apple for not ensuring minimum anti-piracy protections that do not require them to completely pull out of the game.

Frankly, I don't see why this is a big deal. You can iPod as a hard drive to transfer your music to other computers, you just can't pull them from the library on the iPod. Beyond that, there are about a million apps that will pull your music out of the hidden folder, sort it by ID3 and move it onto your hard drive, they just don't work within iTunes as plug-ins.

While no one likes the DRM or arbitrary anti-piracy protections except the music industry itself, Apple has struck a better balance here than many companies. And regardless of your feelings about these protections, they came with the iPod from the beginning as part of the deal. If someone can hack around them and make your life better, hey bully for you, but don't whine about it when Apple makes its software not play nice.

If you are looking for legitimate things to whine about, how about Apple not acknowledging or fixing the audio problems present in the 4G ipods and worse than that, building those problems into the iPod Photo. I would be far more cheesed off about HD spin up noise playing through my headphones than not being able to pull songs through iTunes.