Apple has yet again sent in the lawyers - this seems to be a favourite tactic of theirs which is increasingly giving them a bad name (and I am a Mac fan!).
This time, Apple have gone after a company called Podcast Ready for their use of the word Podcast and myPodder (their product name).
Robert Scoble has suggested using the terms Audiocast and Videocast from now on and dumping the term podcast - however this doesn’t solve the problem for Podcast Ready (nor any potential problems Robert’s company PodTech nor my podcast/audiocast site PodLeaders might yet have). Apple have already gone after several companies for their use of Pod in product names.
Russel Shaw has a very in-depth analysis of this spat where he speculates that:
we have Apple, maker of the iPod, trying to get right with the Trademark office about achieving formal Trademark and related mark protections for iPod AND its sought-after IPODCAST applications.
Russel is probably close to the mark here - however, Apple’s over-vigilence is doing nothing but tarnishing their image.
The new Mac Pro was launched yesterday at the Apple World Wide Developer Conference.
64 bit Quad Xeon - up to 3ghz and 16gb RAM!
Wow!
According to CNet, it appears that the French have backed down on passing legislation which would have forced Apple to open its DRM if it wanted to continue selling music online in France.
The background to this is that all the music which Apple sells online through its iTunes stores has Apple DRM software applied to it stopping the music from being played on any device other than an iPod. France proposed to pass a law recently which would have outlawed the use of DRM to restrict the playing of music to specific devices. As the market leader, this would have hit Apple hardest but other online music vendors were also in the firing line.
On hearing of the law, Apple commented that this was state sponsored piracy! There was talk that Apple would close down its iTunes store in France. Indeed, it may have been forced to as Apple has more than likely signed deals with the music publishers which only allows it to distribute music with DRM.
Now, however, it appears that the law has been considerably watered down by the French senate. According to Ars Technica:
Most of the consumer-friendly provisions in the legislation have since been removed or rewritten. To see how this worked, consider the following examples:
- Previously, “information needed for interoperability” covered “technical documentation and programming interfaces needed to obtain a copy in an open standard of the copyrighted work, along with its legal information.” Now this has been changed to “technical documentation and programming interfaces needed to obtain a protected copy of a copyrighted work.” But a “protected” version of the work can’t be played back in a different player, which means interoperability won’t be attained with this clause.
- Previously, the only condition for receiving information needed for interoperability was to meet the cost of logistics of delivering the information. Now, anyone wanting to build a player will have to take a license on “reasonable and non discriminatory conditions, and an appropriate fee.” When using information attained under such a license, you will have to “respect the efficiency and integrity of the technical measure.”
- DRM publishers can demand the retraction of publication of the source-code for interoperable, independent software, if it can prove that the source-code is “harmful to the security and the efficiency of the DRM.”
Plus ça change, eh?
Apple announced an update to GarageBand 3.0.2 - this update:
addresses issues with video handling, podcast exporting, and importing QuickTime markers. It also addresses a number of other minor issues.
This is amazingly co-incidental timing. I run a podcast for IT@Cork and this morning, when I was trying to edit one particular podcast which I needed to publish today, GarageBand kept crashing on me. If I tried to listen to the podcast through my headphones, it crashed. Several other operations also caused it to crash. I dumped the preferences file, I started the Mac from CD and repaired permissions and repaired the disk - all to no avail.
Then I hear Apple have released an update which “addresses a number of other minor issues”.
It is a good thing I’m not paranoid!
I was interviewed this afternoon by Matt Cooper of Today FM’s The Last Word in a follow-up piece to the Irish Blog Awards.
Matt raised the recent proposal in France to make it legal to crack DRM - this was reported by Reuters yesterday:
France is pushing through a law that would force Apple Computer Inc to open its iTunes online music store and enable consumers to download songs onto devices other than the computer maker’s popular iPod player.
Under a draft law expected to be voted in parliament on Thursday, consumers would be able to legally use software that converts digital content into any format.
It would no longer be illegal to crack digital rights management — the codes that protect music, films and other content — if it is to enable to the conversion from one format to another, said Christian Vanneste, Rapporteur, a senior parliamentarian who helps guide law in France.
“It will force some proprietary systems to be opened up … You have to be able to download content and play it on any device,” Vanneste told Reuters in a telephone interview on Monday.
What I should have said in the interview is that Apple may be forced to close the iTunes Store if this law is passed. My understanding is that Apple are required by their agreements with the recording industry to put DRM on the music. Of course if they did have to close their store, I imagine the sales of music for allofmp3.com in France would soar!
I muddled through the interview but if any of you want to hear what I sound like when the interview mike is pointed the other direction (it isn’t pretty!) - I’ll be on sometime between 6pm and 6:30pm I was told.
I recently treated myself to an Apple iMac G5 - I needed a new machine bcause of the increasing amount of podcasts I have been doing and my PowerBook’s sound board blew (replacing the sound board on a PowerBook costs over €600).
I was using Flock from time to time on the PowerBook (the PowerBook uses a G4 chip) - when I transferred over to the iMac G5, however I find that Flock crashes on start-up. I tried downloading Flock again (v 1.4.1) and re-installing but no joy.
Is anyone else having this problem with Flock and the G5 chipset?
UPDATE:
Following up on a suggestion from Mark in the comments, I deleted the Library/Application Support/Flock folder and that sorted the problem.
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