Real Music
Article: Real in online music price war
Media software firm RealNetworks has halved the price of its music downloads in an aggressive attempt to boost its share of the online music market.
The company is offering songs for $0.49 each, down from the usual $0.99, while albums are available for just $4.99.
Interview with Rob Glaser over at news.com:
Q: Has the Harmony project met your expectations?
A: No, it has blown them away. We took the decision at the beginning of the year to implement Harmony. It really went back to some things we were working on before, where we’ve had good experience with creating technology with interoperability in the past.
Article: Real ‘frees’ Apple’s iPod player
It says its engineers used publicly-available information in order to work out how to make files compatible with Apple’s digital rights management (DRM) software, which is called FairPlay.
Article: The Apple of forbidden knowledge (via Luis Villa)
How exactly had Real “broken into” the iPod? It hadn’t broken into my iPod, which is after all my iPod. If I want to use Real’s service to download music to my own device, where’s the breaking and entering? … So leaving aside the legal claim for a moment, where is the ethical foul? Apple was saying (and apparently believed) that Real had broken into something different from my iPod or your iPod. They had broken into the idea of an iPod. (I imagine a small, Platonic white rectangle, presumably imbued with the spirit of Steve Jobs.)