Apple faces iTunes case in Norway

Negotiations with Apple prove fruitless

By John Oates, 1st October 2008

The Norwegian consumer watchdog is still not happy with how Apple licenses music on its iTunes service and is taking the company to court. The main complaint is that much of the iTunes catalogue is only playable on Apple iPods.

Consumer Ombudsman Bjoern Erik Thon is going to court in Norway after two years of fruitless negotiations with Apple.

Thon wants music bought via iTunes to be playable on any music player. He called on other countries to join the legal action which will be heard by the Norwegian Market Council.

He said: "It’s a consumer’s right to transfer and play digital content bought and downloaded from the internet to the music device he himself chooses to use. iTunes makes this impossible or at least difficult, and hence they act in breach of Norwegian law."

Thon said there had been some movement from Apple on contract terms to allow music to be played on non-iPod devices, but not enough. He said the company had had enough time to remove ties between iTunes and iPods and no progress had been made since their last meeting in February 2008.

Apple has until 3 November to submit comments before the case is heard.

The full statement is here. ®

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Posted Friday 10th October 2008 10:35 GMT

Rolf Harris

So, like, totally...

....I was right then? I understand that we're discussing semantics, but you have to say what you mean, or what you say is meaningless. If CD weren't lossy, which it is, there would be no possible justification for SACD, DVD-Audio, and anything else that samples over 44.1kHz. You may say that there IS no need for SACD etc, but that is because of the assertion that CD is "good enough" which I agree that it is, but it is lossy still compared to the actual audio. SACD is still, too, slightly less so, and also still "good enough". For me, a decent MP3 is good enough too, but my point is that none of these digital audio technologies are non-lossy. Personally, I don't care about that, but I do care about accuracy.

Yes, I am a nit-pick, but also, I don't care about that. Right is right after all. I blame my parents. Or Paris. No reason why, just so as I can.

Rolf ;-).

Posted Friday 3rd October 2008 12:37 GMT

mr.K

@Rolf

Sorry to say so, but you are wrong. You are also a nitpick, but then again by arguing with you so am I.

You claim that digital recording is lossy by definition. Try to look up the definition for lossless and lossy. They are terms used for compression algorithms when the data is already digital. Actually to use the terms at all when it comes to a CD is borderline meaningless since a CD contains no compressed data. So JohnP was correct when he told you that in any normal sense of the word, CDs are not lossy. Don't take my word for it, look it up, please, I just did both in my text books and on the world broad web.

You can of course argue that information is always lost when digitalizing a analog signal. That is true in a sense, but we don't use the terms for that since it always is the case. Furthermore since an analog media never will represent data the same way twice, and that you actually find the same limitations in an analog media as in most digital medias, then everything should be defined lossy by your terms.

btw stay on topic, nitpicking about the definition of words not remotely connected to the topic makes the comments section very hard to read...allright, allright, I'll get my coat.

Posted Thursday 2nd October 2008 12:50 GMT

Rolf Harris

RE: CD is in fact a lossy recording format

Well, the subject of your post was correct. The content wasn't.

CD is lossy.

People think it is, but the fact of the matter is, and there is no way to get away from this, is that any digital recording is LOSSY by definition, it takes the original audio and digitizes it, THROWING AWAY (in your words) some of the information in favour of a digital representation of an analogue source. There is no way that a digital stream can be non-lossy.

What you are saying is that it is to all intents and purposes a non-lossy format and I would agree with you on that point - it's "good enough" for normal hearing (which mine is).

But MP3, AAC, FLAC, WMA, OGG and a hundred other different compression systems, both "lossy" and "non-lossy" from the INPUT DIGITAL SIGNAL can sound JUST AS GOOD as the original input digital source, depending on how you compress, what you compress with, how far you compress and on what you play back the signal, how you uncompress it, and how good your ears are.

Yes, I can hear there is a DIFFERENCE bewteen a WAV I have ripped from a CD, and an MP3 that I have used LAME to compress with using the --r3mix settings, but I CANNOT tell which is actually which in a blind sampling, they both sound "good enough" and so that is good enough.

That is very different from saying that it is non-lossy. It isn't. And CD isn't either, when you understand digital systems (like CD/MP3) and analogue systems (which sound is).

Cheers,

Rolf.