Music is only legal in the format purchased?

[Barry Barcrest]

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?RSS&newsid=5714

Can you believe that? That is one of the carziest things i have ever heard.

[NinjaEpisode]

RIAA and MPAA bunch a retards. 

[spocktwin]

 
Talk about waking the sleeping giants.  If they really try to pursue this avenue of action don't you think Apple and a host of others will weigh in against this?  Apple is making real profits on the Ipod and the host of licensing of accessories they would not want that to be challenged.  I would even think the evil big Brother (aka Microsoft) would have a problem with that stance.
just my two cents
Spock

[nipsmg]

If they honestly think that I'm going to go out, buy a CD, then PAY to download the songs AGAIN to listen to them on my MP3 player, they're out of their ever loving minds. 

I paid for a license to your content.  I now own the content on that CD.  Whether it's on a CD, Hard drive, MP3 player, whatever, I own that for personal use.  Can I copy it and give it to my friends? no (well, not legally at least).

There's good reason for that.  WHAT IF THE CD SCRATCHES!??  Are you going to replace it for me?  No. Of course not.  That's one of the reasons fair use came about.   I'm allowed to make a backup copy. 

Basically, if they take away these laws, the pirates will do EXACTLY what they've been doing, and illegally copy everything, and the consumers will become criminals by protecting their rights. 

This is getting way out of control.

--NipsMG

[Barry Barcrest]

A Lot of people are under the false impression that Apple will not like this move, in fact this move would be ideal for Apple.... It pretty much forces all thier IPOD owning customers down the ITUNEs route. Meaning Cha-ching for apple. They only offered support for standard MP3's because they knew if people could only play stuff they brought of ITUNEs they would not shift anywhere near as many units. The ideal scenario for them is forcing people to use ITUNEs.

[richms]

If the quality of the itunes store was lossless and there was a guarentee that they would remain playable forever with the restrictions that were inplace when the song was sold then I would be interested, but as they are lossy and they can change the usage of previously "purchased" content at there whim, or if they cease existance that my "collection" becomes worthless I have decided to continue to buy music I think is worth buying on round shiney discs that may look like CDs and then rip them thru whatever means nessacary.

[Silver]

What format and bitrate does itunes use now or does it vary? I assume its AAC but what is the bitrate of songs you pay for?

'Lossless' - IMHO - has always been overkill. But at the same time - IMHO - 96/128k mp3's or whatever is a waste of time. New codecs get better and better at 128k, sure, but why not just encode at 256k or 'up to 320VBR'? As loads and loads of blind ABX tests have shown, for 99.9% of music almost no human on earth can actually tell the difference from the original source at high(256vbr+) bitrate - thats on mp3/ogg/wma/aac - whatever, makes no difference.