Tell them, my song.

I’m writing this because I once again stumbled over some blogs of technophile folks who pride themselves with having successfully jailbroken Apple’s iPhone.

People buy iPhones because they somehow fell in love with that little device that could be out of a Star Trek movie. Then they quickly discover that the iPhone is just a pretty looking device that’s significantly crippled - you cannot use it with the phone provider of your choice and you cannot install software on it that did not get Apple’s blessing. For example, there still is no legal way to install Python on the iPhone, although a Python interpreter for it exists. You need to jailbreak the iPhone to do all these things, which is a fancy word for hacking it.

Now many people still buy iPhones, forfeit their warranty and illegally jailbreak their new phone. Only to do something they should have been able to do in the first place: Use the phone with a phone provider of their choice - or maybe just use the phone in a country where it is not yet sold - and install software on without having to comply with Apple’s vendor lock-in sales strategies.

Somehow, remotely, this kind of remembers me of the situation with DVD playback on GNU/Linux systems: People hacked the DVD encryption not to make illegal copies of their DVDs, but to watch them on their operating system of choice. Absurd as it sounds, but customers had to do something illegal to obtain their legal rights.

Copyright laws in general have become consumer hostile to an almost ridiculous degree, and it’s copyright laws that enable Apple to create mechanisms to completely control what their customers can do with their products and enforce them by law. How can the interests of a company with a few thousand employees weigh more than the interest of more than ten million customers who have bought their shiny mobile phone?

How can it be legal that the movie industry sells you DVDs but does not allow you to watch them with free software?

How can it be legal that Apple sells you an iPhone but tells you what carrier to use with it and what software you are allowed to install on a device that is a mobile computer? What would you ask Microsoft if they sold you a notebook on which you could only install software that you’ve bought from a Microsoft store? (Not that their Xbox 360 works any differently, by the way.)

The sad truth is that the lobbies to which those companies belong have managed to purchase themselves laws that legalize all their monopolistic strategies.

Jailbreaking these devices is the wrong answer that we consumers can give those companies.

The only right answer is not to buy such crippled hardware.

But to make your day and to contradict myself here: I own an Xbox 360 and an iPod Touch.

I am fully okay with the Xbox and when I bought it, I was fully aware of the fact that it was a DRM fortress. But I only use it for gaming and I do not pirate software. The Xbox 360 is a great deal for what I have purchased her and I do not mind her copy protection mechanisms in the least. It’s a gaming device, and I understand the need of the companies for a certain degree of copy protection. I’ve once worked for a software company that went bankrupt, and until today you can still download our software from file sharing networks. When my employer went bust, I’ve had to live off my credit card for three months before I saw my last salary. That wasn’t funny and it made me think a lot about software piracy (and poor management, but that is a different story).

I am not okay with the restrictions Apple has put on the iPod Touch. There simply is no excuse for why I cannot install any software that I want on it, and there certainly is no excuse for why I can only purchase software from Apple’s AppStore for that device. Monopoly is the word for this situation, and Apple is misusing its position to not even let a competition come into existence.

I had bought the iPod Touch when it was clear that Apple would introduce a software developer kit for it - and in my naive interpretation for me that meant that Apple was going to open the device. But they haven’t.

So did I buy the iPod Touch under a wrong assumption? Obviously yes. I was not expecting to be treated by this company like I was an underage retard whose only right to exist is to pour some money into Apple’s pockets.

Besides being so closed that I can only install software from Apple’s AppStore, the iPod Touch - like the iPhone - is also a device that does not even let me copy my DRM-free-music files to whatever other device or computer as I see fit.

Which part of my files are DRM-free is Apple not understanding here?

And which part of IT’S NONE OF APPLE’S FUCKING BUSINESS WHAT I DO WITH MY OWN DRM-FREE FILES are they also not willing to understand?

I could only copy files that I’ve bought from their iTunes store, and then it would not even matter if they were DRM-free or not.

But without having paid an Apple tax, I cannot do what’s my legal right to do.

If the word democracy was worth the ink and paper that were used to write it down, (copyright) laws would protect the consumers, not the corporations.

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