IP vs. the iPod

From the good people of the EFF:

Senator Orrin Hatch's new Inducing Infringement of Copyright Act (S.2560, Induce Act) would make it a crime to aid, abet, or induce copyright infringement. He wants us all to think that the Induce Act is no big deal and that it only targets "the bad guys" while leaving "the good guys" alone. He says that it doesn't change the law; it just clarifies it.

He's wrong.

Right now, under the Supreme Court's ruling in Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, Inc. (the Betamax VCR case), devices like the iPod and CD burners are 100% legal - not because they aren't sometimes used for infringement, but because they also have legitimate uses. The Court in Sony called these "substantial non-infringing uses." This has been the rule in the technology sector for the last 20 years. Billions of dollars and thousands of jobs have depended on it. Industries have blossomed under it. But the Induce Act would end that era of innovation. Don't let this happen on your watch - tell your Senators to fight the Induce Act!

local tags: activism eff government ip ipod music privacy

When Good Firmware Goes Bad

I've loved my shiny new iPod since November of last year, when I gave in to an acute case of technolust and bought the 40GB model. Six months on, despite the entry cost, the inability of Apple products to live happily in a PC universe without loads of expensive accessories, and the disconcerting set of scratches that appeared on the display almost immediately, I'd still say I was very happy.

That is until last week. Apparently, while I was running a standard firmware update (to the 4/28/04 release), the basic file system on my iPod became corrupted without warning, and everything on the pod was -- erased. *38 GB* of all sorts of personally and professionally important files evaporated without so much as an unhappy face...

As it so happens, I was planning to wipe and rebuild anyway, so I've decided to look at this incident as an example of pre-emptive self-cleansing on the part of an exceptionally eager to please iPod, instead of a catastrophic file system failure.

But I'm still pissed. I have strong memories of using a Mac at a design studio in '99, and deciding that I should wear a helmet to work because it crashed so often. This reminds me of that in a more personal and equally frustrating way.

And it's going to cost Apple some money, to boot. I just decided that I'd replace my aging Dell laptop with a tasty new Powerbook - and now I think I'll be buying something else. Great design and marketing don't make up for unreliability.

local tags: apple ipod ux