Articles For Week 5 (iTunes)
Maddy's Review on P2P Downloads Crushing iTunes
http://www.slyck.com/story1642_P2P_Downloads_Crush_iTunesDigital_Sales_201
Maddy writes in her review of this article about the p2p dellemma and how it has not been stemmed by iTune's efforts to sell their music online. CD sales are still down from where the record companies want them to be since the public craze over p2p brought on by the Napster fiasco. P2P however is on the upswing with more users and less controll. The article goes on to review that Bit-torrent has been remarkable hard to shut down and that all attempts thus far have failed. iTunes has sold about 3.5 billion songs since 2003 when it started, and P2P networks trade over 1billion a month and that isn't including BitTorrent.
iTunes is a useful tool in the battle against illegal file sharing. It offers high quality music files for cheap and easy access, but free still beats cheap. I personally wonder if iTunes could successfuly start up a members only BitTorrent that charges a nominal monthly fee to get your IP address registered. CDs are a dieng art and the music industry still wails that it's sales are down on it's biggest product when, supprise supprise, people don't want them anymore. In a working system, if your customers want something else, you should start producing it.
Ome's Review on Students Debate on Music: Buy, Burn or Bootleg
http://media.www.hsuoracle.com/media/storage/paper927/news/2008/02/04/Entertainment/Students.Debate.On.Music.Buy.Burn.Or.Bootleg-3190441.shtml
Ome writes in her review that students will choose the path to get their music that suits them personally. If they download illegally, its because it's free or their tastes arn't catered to in stores. If they download legally, like through iTunes, it is because it is their wish to support the artists. However, the money made by purchasing a legitimate album is likely to go to the record label, not the artist.
iTunes shares some of the same problems as the CD industry. Although it has a very wide selection, not everyone pushes their music to iTunes making people who don't want to spend the money on CDs go to download it illegaly. It isn't free eaither, although the low price per track is nice, if someone is after a great deal of music it still ends up being far more expensive than downloading it illegaly.
Dave's Review on New Software Allows File Sharing Between Devices
http://www.nme.com/news/nme/34495
Dave writes in his review about a new bit of software called DoubleTwist that strips the DRM from iTunes music. While the act of stripping a DRM is still illegal in and of itself thanks to the DMCA, the music can still be used under fair use. The sellers of DoubleTwist claim that they are simply releaseing a product that saves users time since the traditional way around iTunes protection is to burn it to a CD and then rip it right back off as a .mp3 or a .aac allowing you to put the music on any device you want, not just the iPod. "...law professionals... say that the software creator's case is pretty weak, but there isn't a whole lot of clarity in the gray area that is fair use." writes Needham. He continues by wondering about how iTunes release of DRM-free music will affect things. Although he remains somewhat pessimistic about this, Apple has already sold quite a few of the slightly higher priced protection-free music.