At the outset, you might think that having a program archive your files using a secret code is itself an abrogation of your rights as a user of your own files…
Recently, when they switched over to iPhone firmware 2.x, Apple stringently disallowed everything but iTunes from uploading music to the phone. They did this by changing the previously-interpreted hashing mechanism by which the phone encodes and decodes media files. (For those unfamiliar with the term, a hashing mechanism is merely the secret code that otherwise plain files are written with, which is why the actual filenames on the phone have strings of numbers and letters in them instead of anything readable.) iTunes had always been the only authorized program for uploading files to iPods and iPhones, and it had always used a secret coding system, but that system had previously been cracked, and with its most recent switch Apple invested heavily in making this new hash uncrackable.
At the outset, you might think that having a program archive your files using a secret code is itself an abrogation of your rights as a user of your own files (at least those you acquired legally), but I suppose one could argue that any compression of those files is also a kind of encryption, if at the very least a publicly available and “free” form. Whether or not that’s the case, Apple’s behavior is at its least anti-competitive because they refuse to let other programs do the work they’ve set aside from iTunes.
Now, Apple has strong financial incentives to engage in this uncompetitive behavior, which ultimately makes it so that anyone who wants to listen to music on an iPhone must use their software, iTunes, to upload it. By forcing users to upload music to the iPhone with iTunes, Apple increases the likelihood that these iPhoners will purchase music with iTunes as well.
Further out, by ensuring that iTunes runs horribly (or not at all) on software not produced by Apple, they can further encourage new users to buy Apple products. iTunes is notoriously crappy on Windows, for instance, even though they’ve had years to make it work to some satisfaction, and they’re unlikely to ever produce a version of iTunes for Linux.
Linux users who would like to use an iPhone, then, have only a few options, aside from giving up their operating system of choice: to figure out a way to use iTunes anyway, or circumvent Apple’s hashing mechanism.
Now, the latter is precisely what a group of coders have been doing for awhile, under a project called “lpodhash”, but recently Apple used the DMCA to attempt to bully the lpodhash project volunteers into giving up their pursuit of cracking the hashing scheme. The coders haven’t backed down. What’s more, from a legal-ethical standpoint, their pursuits are wholly justifiable.
Last week, we talked about whether or not someone who buys a media file is buying and owning the file or merely buying a method of conveyance. This discussion again applies here, and I think we can even extend it to say that in the current problem anyone who buys an iPhone is, along with the phone, merely leasing a method of conveyance from Apple for all media files the user already “owns.” I like the word “leasing” here because this distribution method (in the form of the phone+the hashing mechanism) is not something that Apple would be required to ever relinquish or even permanently offer support for. They have total control over it and, by extension, everything you’d want to use with it.
This is probably not what most iPhone customers sign up for, so it’s another battle that would be absurd in the commodities world but which in the world of information consumption is blithely accepted and even ignored. Apple wants not only to sell a product but also to dictate how that product is to be used in ways that maximize their opportunities for profit. In this way they are effectively selling the iPhone with hidden costs, including the costs of using their software and the cost of those platforms upon which that software is most efficient.
Not only that, but Apple has been acting for a number of years in this way, clearly limiting consumer access to alternative software, and as such as they’re acting in the same ways that gave Microsoft a bad reputation. In the past month for instance, European courts have decided that Microsoft can’t legally force users to buy Internet Explorer when they buy the Windows operating system.
Luckily, another coder figured out an easy fix for the iPhone’s hashing problem, but a familiar problem has again been illustrated: an attempt to control the usage of a information-age product with the goal of maximizing profit on one side, and a predilection for resisting this on the other. It seems that whenever information-era corporations seek to sell a product and then offer users as little rights as possible in the usage of that product, this one-sided and reprehensible practice inevitably encourages more consumers to fight these efforts than fall in line.
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