PyMusique and iTunes Music Store: Problem or Opportunity?

"The great tragedy of science -- the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."
-Thomas Huxley

In case you hadn't heard, PyMusique is causing quite a stir in the online music world. An email from the author "DVD" Jon Johansen states:

PyMusique is an interface to the iTunes Music Store that lets you preview songs, sign up for an account and buy songs. It is somewhat interesting from a DMCA/EUCD perspective. The iTunes Music Store actually sells songs without DRM. While iTunes adds DRM to your purchases, PyMusique does not. Another difference is that signing up for an account using PyMusique does not require you to sign/click away any of your rights.

The application is written in Python and can be compiled in to versions for Windows, OS X, Linux or any other OS that has a good version for Python available to it. Which opens up a couple of interesting issues.

First of all, the combination of this software and the recently cracked AAC codec means that Linux users can now buy and play music from the iTunes store. The "bits just want to be free" idealist in me thinks that's a great thing. I think that DRM (digital rights management) usually fails to make the content it's applied to safer from piracy by tech-savvy users and (worse) ends up simply inconveniencing everyone else. The other downside is that DRM usually only works on platforms with compatible software written for it. That usually means Windows and (maybe) Macintosh. Every other OS gets left out in the cold. Open (or at least common) standards are what level the playing field between established platforms and new-comers like Linux and the revitalized Amiga. It seems unfair that an entire market of users is left with no legal means of participating in a sphere of activity simply because nobody has written a software babysitter for the files they'd like to use.

Second of all, as a part time Mac user, the whole thing leaves me a bit concerned. The iPod and the iTMS are a big part of Apple's current success in the market right now and I don't think the RIAA is going to look favorably on the DRM being stripped out of the music files it's members have sanctioned Apple to sell online. Apple has already had to face pressure from the music industry to raise the prices of the songs it sells from the nice round $.99 to $1.29 or more. In the face of the FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) campaign from the "new" Napster's rent-your-music-by-the-month ads, having iTMS DRM cracked, patched a day later and cracked again isn't going to help the online music portion of its business. If Apple's online music business is hurt, a chunk of its profitability and its ability to tie-in to its core computer business gets hurt along with it. As a fan of the only non-Microsoft platform I can get major applications for, this worries me.

There is one small light at the end of this tunnel, and it doesn't hinge on Apple closing every DRM loop-hole that DVD Jon could exploit. All that would take is adding DRM to the files before the user downloads them. No, the sliver of hope I'm wishing on is that this "problem" will actually cause a spike in iTMS sales. What PyMusic takes out of the equation is DRM, not paying for the music. The debacle has certainly caused lots of publicity for both PyMusique and iTMS. What if Linux users came out in droves to purchase music before Apple permanently closes the loop-hole? What if freedom-loving Mac and Windows users did the same? Apple, and by extension its RIAA partners, would certainly profit from all of this activity. Maybe, just maybe, this would be another economic vote against DRM by the consumer.

It's certainly a beautiful hypothesis... only time will tell if it's slain by an ugly fact.

Mac OS X and Windows XP: Things they should steal from each other

There is a lot to love about OS X when you compare it to OS 9. There are many things that XP improves on over Windows 2000. There are also many things that I could live without on both platforms. They are both resource hogs (especially when it comes to RAM). I've watched both operating systems take previously very usable machine from snappy, responsive computers to crawling, page-file hitting geriatric retirees.

However there are a few things that only become apparent when you switch from usingone platform to the other in the course of your day. This is especially true with applications that run on both machine: Firefox, Thunderbird, Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, etc. So without further ado...

Things that I wish OS X would steal from XP:

1) Arrow tabbing dialog buttons

A dialog box comes up and asks you if you'd like to quit without saving. In both operating systems, one of the buttons is highlighted, which allows you to hit enter (return) to choose that option without moving your hands from the keyboard. In XP, if you'd like to choose another option, just use the arrow keys to move the highlight to another button and then hit enter. In OS X, you have to use the mouse to pick something else.

In fact, if there's one thing that XP does better over all, it's allowing the end user to drive the box for long periods of time without taking his hands from the keyboard. OS X is better at that than OS 9, but it's still not the same.

2) User definable eye candy

Both operating systems feature 32 bit icons, transparency effects (like drop shadows), lickable window widgets and font smoothing. OS is arguably prettier (your mileage may vary) than XP is with all the goodies turned on, but at least in XP I can turn the goodies off. Why would I want to do that? On newer machines it allows me to reclaim my system resources for actual work, and on older machines it can mean the difference between usability or not. In XP, I can set how much of my CPU cycles and video card memory I'm using just to redraw windows. In OS X, Steve Jobs decides how much of my machine's resources are used just to boot the thing up into idle.

Things that I wish XP would borrow from OS X:

1) Simplified Networking

In OS X, the network options are all configured from one pane which can give you an overview of everything or zoom down to the MAC address of your Ethernet card. Airport does a great job of locating and front-ending wireless networks that are in reception range. Multiple configurations for all of this are stored in the locations area. With a single drop down choice from the apple menu, my machine can switch to appear at a specific IP on my office LAN or change and get my IP from my DHCP router at home. This is very nice for laptops.

In XP, there are multiple layers of everything and they are all tied to your hardware devices. Not unfathomable or unusable, just needlessly complicated for the end user. I'd love to see some kind of location functionality on the Windows laptop we have at home.

2) Fast User Switching

In OS X, you can log into another user account, fire up some programs, do some work and then switch back to the first account without quitting any applications or logging out first. You can run as many accounts simultaneously as the machine can handle. It's not something that most people need, but it's nice to be able to do. I use it for light admin stuff that I don't want to use the command line for. Families that share one computer and coworkers that have different accounts on one machine are just some people who can benefit from this. In some environments, it's practically a selling point.

3) Password Verification for Everything

In XP, you visit the wrong page on the wrong day you can end up with all kinds of "Browser Help Objects" installed into your system feeding you pop-ups, hijacking your hosts file and redirecting your browser to places you don't want to go. In OS X, I can't even install security updates from Apple without verifying things with my password. I've had to manually remove spyware infections from Windows boxes at work before. I'd much rather type my password a few times a month.