I hate the EU. I hate them so much. They act as if the products of a company are a right and not a privilege. The people who own a company have a right to do whatever they want to with their products. If people don't like what a company does, they don't have to buy from them. They tried to force Apple to open up their DRM and Jobs caved just by starting to get rid of it. While it's better for consumers and the music industry, it doesn't change the fact that Apple should be free to do whatever they want with their products. How is it Apple's fault that people continue to buy their products and music companies remain signed with them? They're obviously offering something that's better than the alternative. If not, then people wouldn't buy from them.
The EU forced Microsoft to release a version of Windows without media player. When Microsoft finally complied, the OS bombed. Few people wanted Windows without Media Player. The EU also required Microsft to release source code for their OS, and they did for Server 2003. This hasn't done anything to help other companies, but it only infringes on Microsoft's rights. I wish companies as rich as Microsft and Apple would forget about the European market and stand on principle. I wish they would just refuse to comply and would offer no services to EU nations until the EU backed off. And they would back off because people WANT products from Apple and Microsoft. It's hard to explain how much the audacity of the EU pisses me off. I don't mean to go on a pointless angry rant, though. My point is that the EU is hurting the future marketplace and I don't want the repercussions to carry over to the U.S.
The EU isn't the only thing I hate (the list is actually quite long, but most of it is unrelated to this thread); I also hate DRM. However, government has no business mandating changes to it or its elimination. DRM helped get copyrighted materials up for sale on the Internet. It's likely that we wouldn't have most of the stuff available to us now in digital form without DRM (except for what's offered through piracy, of course). No one would purchase DRM products if people didn't find them to be better than the alternative (I don't care if your reasoning is that it's cheaper or more convenient or whatever else you like about downloading your entertainment). If you purchase ebooks and don't like them better than something else you might purchase, I'd ask why you don't just flush your money down the toilet. While the EU was busy filing lawsuits and costing the companies whose products their citizens enjoy millions of dollars, music with DRM was going the way of the dodo due to market forces. While Steve Jobs was clearly reacting to pressure from Europe, Amazon made its move to offer music without DRM and for a cheaper price. Even while iTunes was booming, eMusic remained (and remains) the second largest distributer of digital music without any DRM music. The idea that the market would not move away from or make changes to DRM without threats from governments is absurd and grotesque.
Ebooks are only now becoming more popular due to eInk devices (and especially the hype surrounding the Amazon Kindle). For the most part, I can't imagine publishers diving into the market without any DRM because they are unsure of what the profits will be like. The printed page still remains a much more lucrative business than ebooks. Of course publishers are going to be skeptical. In this sense, DRM is allowing companies to test the waters in the same way it did for music and movies. Consumers will call for an elimination of DRM on ebooks soon enough. It's why hackers constantly find ways of allowing people to crack DRM. It's not meant to be criminal, it's meant to allow consumers make full use of what they paid for. Frankly, I find nothing criminal about removing DRM from something I legally purchased. If you bought it, you should be able to do whatever you want with it. I don't imagine many in this community plan on sharing their legal purchases for free, anyway. I think piracy is less of a threat than the industry thinks it is; they're just reacting the wrong way.
Hmmm... I seem to have ranted on long enough. I really only came here to express my distaste with the EU, but I couldn't really do that without explaining why. It wouldn't have been fair. So there you have it.
