Saturday, June 07, 2008

iTunes Movie Rollout in Canada - sans DMCA

Apple is making available lots of movies for Canadians.

iTunes users in Canada and the United Kingdom will now be able to download and rent movies from Apple's online store.

Canadians will be able to choose from over 1,200 films such as "Juno," "I Am Legend," and "Cloverfield" from movie studios including 20th Century Fox, Paramount and Sony Pictures. More than 200 of the available titles for rent come in high definition.

Those in the UK will have a library of over 700 films, Apple said. The British rental catalog also features over 100 titles available in high definition.


This is the first big Apple online movie rollout after the USA, shared with the UK - hardly a pirate haven and, indeed, a leader in the EU.

This clearly suggests that Apple has little if any concern about any alleged inadequacies of current Canadian copyright law, which is apparently quite adequate to protect its interests and that of the studios.

And Apple just loves DRM and TPM, when it suits it.

One more reason why we don't need a Canadian DMCA ("CDMCA").

HK

3 comments:

  1. And Apple just loves DRM and TPM, when it suits it.

    That is untrue.

    Apple was unable to reach a deal for its music store until it came up with DRM that the music rightsholders liked. So it uses it.

    But Apple certainly doesn't "love" it, and has said on a number of occasions that it would much prefer to move forward without DRM.

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  2. If Apple didn't "love" DRM, then why did they incorporate a variety of it into their operating system making it impossible to run on standard x86 based hardware without a "hack"? They would certainly sell more copies except for that little "feature".

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  3. Well, yeah, more copies of OS X... But people like you (and probably people like me too) would pay Apple (or not pay anything) for the OS alone and then install it onto our own hardware. If Apple allowed, like Windows, the use of any hardware with their OS they would presumably have to provide some support for said hardware, and there's just too much out there.
    The reason a Mac "just works" is that Apple controls every aspect of it's development. If Apple were to sell OS X for x86 they would lose their reputation for the "just works" computer.

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