Apple Makes Some Overdue Changes to Copyright, Pricing

I was very encouraged to read this story in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. We have four Ipods in our family. The two older kids have the swanky square Nano’s that play video, and my husband and I have the old rectangular Nano’s. I got mine about four years ago and still love it. My husband inherited his when the kids were “upgraded” to the newer Nano’s via their Nana.

With four of us using Ipods, we’ve spent plenty of money at the Itunes store. Therefore, it is incredibly frustrating that we can’t use any of those songs, which were legally purchased and belong to us, with other software programs like my slideshow program in Adobe Photoshop or my Flip movie-making program. I’ve had to download music from Amazon.com to do that. And I love the fact that Amazon has a bunch of songs you can download for free that work with ANY software program. In fact, the video in this post is utilizing one of those free songs.

But now it looks like Apple is going to lift its copyright protection from eight million songs immediately and from the remaining two million songs by the end of March.  Plus, you can pay to “upgrade” any existing songs in your Itunes library to the copyright-free version. I doubt I’ll be doing that unless there is one I just have to have for a slideshow or video. But I am glad to hear that anything purchased going forward will be more user-friendly.

Oh — and Apple is implemeting a new pricing structure, with some songs costing only 69 cents, some remaining at 99 cents and some songs costing $1.29. Apple says the vast majority of songs will cost 69 cents. Whatever. I’ll believe it when I see it. I’m more excited about the copyright issue, because I think this new pricing plan will probably be a price increase.