Microsoft warns: "Apple monopoly too restrictive"

Until Apple will license Fairplay to competitors, it is too restrictive.

IMHO, iTunes is going to wither unless they do.
 
RussSchultz said:
Until Apple will license Fairplay to competitors, it is too restrictive.

IMHO, iTunes is going to wither unless they do.
Well, at the moment they aren't exactly withering.
They aren't mindblowingly big either, though. The Pepsi campaign (100 Million songs given away (codes under caps)) + SuperBowl is going to give them some significant end-user awareness.
It will be interesting to see the effect on iTunes sales for the following half a year or so.

So far, I only use iTunes as a player, mostly for net-radio.
But I can't see that liscensing Fairplay to competitors will make a whole lot of difference to me as an end-user. Given that Apple has been the only personal computer manufacturer apart from Dell that has consistently turned a profit, I doubt that other manufacturers will provide me with better safety (which I'd provide to myself by burning the songs to CD anyway). Nor is it likely to lower the cost of songs, given that the labels get 0.65 out of the 0.99 for each song there isn't much room for lower prices.

Entropy
 
Ummm, why would I sign up for iTunes if I can't play the music I bought on my portable without a bunch of trouble?

Most portable players don't support AAC.
None but the iPod support Fairplay.
 
Most people seem to solve this by using their burnt CDs and recode from there to whatever format they fancy. Ogg is in vogue, and my ideological favourite, although players are rare indeed.

Personally, I'm archaic enough to favour MDs still for ambulatory use. My wife however has got her eyes set on a 40GB iPod for MP3s, data storage and as a spare start-up disk in case of HD disaster. I might get hooked as well, but my toy-money is earmarked for a TungstenT3, unless the R420 or a PowerVR chip sees the light of day RSN.
 
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