It’s a pitfall of being successful: you’ll get protestors.
There were demonstrations at Apple Stores earlier this month by anti-DRM activists. Boing Boing editorializes:
…a national day of demonstrations at Apple stores over the way that iTunes treats Apple customers like crooks in the service of the music industry.
That’s funny — I’m no blind defender of Apple, but I think that the iTunes system is the most fair and least restrictive DRM out there. I mean, it has almost no teeth at all: you can burn your downloaded music to a CD, and presto! No more DRM! You can import it again and again and pass it around and do whatever the hell you want with it, with no digital restriction.
But since Apple has the huge market share in digital music downloads, they get the protests. Why aren’t these people protesting the haphazard and ultra-restrictive Windows Media Format? Or the dozen other DRMed-to-death formats from other music download services? Why aren’t they up in arms over the subscription-based services that disable all your music if you don’t pay for it again and again every month? They complain that if you want to switch to a competing device, you’ll have to abandon your entire iTunes collection. Um, isn’t that true for EVERY music store?
I guess they wouldn’t have gotten so much attention that way.
