After posting about the Hymn project yesterday, I found an article about Apple and a monopoly lawsuit filed against the company. The complaint is about the dependency between iTunes and iPods. Music and videos purchased on iTunes do not work with portable players other than iPods, and iPods cannot play music purchased online from competitors. An interesting point is that the lawsuit argues that the iPod hardware by default supports the WMA (Windows Media Audio) format, but that it is disabled purposely in iPods.

It is interesting that Apple is now dominant enough in the music industry to provoke antitrust lawsuits. They have certainly dominated digital media players. Microsoft’s mp3 player, the Zune, did not do well in sales over the holidays just after it was released. I don’t think the fact that you can’t play iTunes music on other players affected this. The Zune just doesn’t offer enough of a significant advantage over iPods to entice people to switch. The only interesting feature they added was the ability to share songs between Zunes, but there is a huge limitation on this type of sharing — you can only listen to the song three times or for three days, whichever comes first. Is that really such an advantage over borrowing your friend’s player for a few minutes? I have not seen the software that comes with the Zune, but it is hard to beat iTunes, despite the DRM limitations on purchased music. The iTunes has a clean, easy to use interface with interesting capabilities like dynamic playlists. So does the antitrust lawsuit have merit? It will be very interesting to see the results.

I stumbled across the Hymn Project today. Its purpose is to remove the DRM associated with music purchased on iTunes. There is a GUI version of the program that works on both Macs and PCs. Now, I’m not advocating illegally obtaining music here, only the ability to play the music you have already purchased on many platforms. For example, iTunes music does not play on unsupported mp3 players or in other music software. A workaround that I know of is to burn your purchased iTunes music to CD and then rip the CD to mp3 (or whatever format you want). However, this results in a loss of quality. Since the iTunes songs are already fairly low quality (128 kbit/s), I don’t want to lose any more. The Hymn program looks like a nice alternative for me to be able to use music I have purchased in software and on hardware not supported by Apple, and to be able to continue to play the music on PCs that I own beyond the 5 computer limit imposed by Apple.

Here are the benefits of Hymn according to the web site:

• To decrypt your iTunes protected AAC files so that they can be played on operating systems for which no official version of iTunes exists, such as Linux.
• To use non-Apple AAC-capable hardware to play your music.
• To eliminate the five computer limit imposed by iTunes.
• To make archival backups of your music.
• As the first step in converting your music from protected AAC to MP3, Ogg, or your other favorite audio file format, for use with your non-iPod portable audio player.
• To demonstrate your belief in the principles of fair-use under copyright law.

The last point is a big one. Fair use under copyright law implies that if you purchase music (purchase the license to use material under copyright), you should be able to listen to it without limitations. DRM (Digital Rights Management) is one option used to prevent people from sharing music illegally. However, I personally don’t think it really works in practice. The honest people are going to pay for the music they like, and if they do so through iTunes, there are limits imposed on playing the music. With some hassle, there are ways to overcome the DRM limitations. The dishonest people are probably just going to obtain the music illegally anyway as they continue to do today. DRM may actually encourage the use of file sharing to obtain music if people who might otherwise purchase music legally want to have DRM free files. Of course, they can usually purchase a CD almost as easily, but this option breaks down if someone wants only one or two songs on an album.