Commentary

InformationWeek
InformationWeek  

When You Buy an iPod, who controls what you can play on it?

So RealNetworks, with the announcement of Harmony Technology earlier this week , makes it possible to play the music purchased from Real's music store on Apple's iPod music players. Since this makes Apple's music player more useful to its customers, by enabling iPod owners to play music purchased from another online store on their iPods, one would think Apple wouldn't mind so much. But Apple doesn't seem too keen on Real's idea. Apple is not only threatening to make its iPods not compatible with Harmony, but also possible legal action against Real Networks as well. Can you imagine a world where radios only played music that was also only broadcast and licensed to be distributed by the radio maker?

So RealNetworks, with the announcement of Harmony Technology earlier this week , makes it possible to play the music purchased from Real's music store on Apple's iPod music players.

Since this makes Apple's music player more useful to its customers, by enabling iPod owners to play music purchased from another online store on their iPods, one would think Apple wouldn't mind so much. But Apple doesn't seem too keen on Real's idea. Apple is not only threatening to make its iPods not compatible with Harmony, but also possible legal action against Real Networks as well.


More Security Insights

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

Webcasts

More >>

Can you imagine a world where radios only played music that was also only broadcast and licensed to be distributed by the radio maker?


Related Reading




Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
T-Shirt Giveaway T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting!
Subscribe to RSS

Resource Links