Thursday, October 27, 2005

iTunes music store

So, many of you know that the iTunes music store has started in Australia. This is great. It begins to bring an end my long term delimma over the fact that it is technically illegal in Australia to "rip" music from CD's and place them into iTunes (or incedently, any other program like Windows Media Player).
The Music Store gives us quite a few options now. You can download the music, and put it on five seperate computers, and play it. Some might say that's different from a CD where you can put it in any cd player and expect it to play, however I must say - it really isn't. You can only play a CD in a single computer at a time. I can play my iTunes music that I download on any number of computers at once. That is much better licensing terms.
Apple even encourages you to make a CD backup (and suggests it as part of the licensing conditions). It is illegal in Australia to make any copies of a CD - so how much better is that! Not to mention the instantaneous access to a hugely wide variety of music that we didn't have access to before. Shame about Sony BMG though.
But this begs the ethical question. Should I now delete all the music I own out of iTunes, and slowly repurchase it through the iTunes music store, or can I continue in the knowledge that I own the CD's, that the CD's are filed in a cupboard somewhere and I do not listen to the CD's - I only listen to them off iTunes, and as such I'm not breaking the spirit of the law...

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