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I would have been fine. If I had been a less enthusiastic evangelist for Apple\'s products -- if I hadn\'t shown my mom how iTunes Music Store worked -- I would have been fine. If I hadn\'t bought so much iTunes music that burning it to CD and re-ripping it and re-keying all my metadata was too daunting a task to consider, I would have been fine. 

As it was Apple rewarded my trust, evangelism and out-of-control spending by treating me like a crook and locking me out of my own music, at a time when my Powerbook was in the shop -- i.e., at a time when I was hardly disposed to feel charitable to Apple. 

I\'m an edge case here, but I\'m a *leading edge* case. If Apple succeeds in its business plans, it will only be a matter of time until even average customers have upgraded enough hardware and bought enough music to end up where I am. 

You know what I would totally buy? A record player that let me play everybody\'s records. Right now, the closest I can come to that is an open source app called VLC, but it\'s clunky and buggy and it didn\'t come pre-installed on my computer. 

Sony didn\'t make a Betamax that only played the movies that Hollywood was willing to permit -- Hollywood asked them to do it, they proposed an early, analog broadcast flag that VCRs could hunt for and respond to by disabling recording. Sony ignored them and made the product they thought their customers wanted. 

I\'m a Microsoft customer. Like millions of other Microsoft customers, I want a player that plays anything I throw at it, and I think that you are just the company to give it to me. 

Yes, this would violate copyright law as it stands, but Microsoft has been making tools of piracy that change copyright law for decades now. Outlook, Exchange and MSN are tools that abet widescale digital infringement. 

More significantly, IIS and your caching proxies all make and serve copies of documents without their authors\' consent, something that, if it is legal today, is only legal because companies like Microsoft went ahead and did it and dared lawmakers to prosecute. 

Microsoft stood up for its customers and for progress, and won so decisively that most people never even realized that there was a fight. 

Do it again! This is a company that looks the world\'s roughest, toughest anti-trust regulators in the eye and laughs. Compared to anti-trust people, copyright lawmakers are pantywaists. You can take them with your arm behind your back. 

In Siva Vaidhyanathan\'s book The Anarchist in the Library, he talks about why the studios are so blind to their customers\' desires. It\'s because people like you and me spent the 80s and the 90s telling them bad science fiction stories about impossible DRM technology that would let them charge a small sum of money every time someone looked at a movie -- want to fast-forward? That feature costs another penny. Pausing is two cents an hour. The mute button will cost you a quarter. 

When Mako Analysis issued their report last month advising phone companies to stop supporting Symbian phones, they were just writing the latest installment in this story. Mako says that phones like my P900, which can play MP3s as ringtones, are bad for the cellphone economy, because it\'ll put the extortionate ringtone sellers out of business. What Mako is saying is that just because you bought the CD doesn\'t mean that you should expect to have the ability to listen to it on your MP3 player, and just because it plays on your MP3 player is no reason to expect it to run as a ringtone. I wonder how they feel about alarm clocks that will play a CD to wake you up in the morning? Is that strangling the nascent \"alarm tone\" market? 

The phone companies\' customers want Symbian phones and for now, at least, the phone companies understand that if they don\'t sell them, someone else will. 

The market opportunity for a truly capable devices is enormous. There\'s a company out there charging *$27,000* for 
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