Your Honor, I object! We certainly didn’t intend this issue of TidBITS to focus on legal battles. It wasn’t our idea for the French to propose a law that would require Apple to allow any music player to play music from the iTunes Music Store. Plus, we simply couldn’t have predicted that the Apple Computer v. Apple Corps lawsuit would be scheduled for the same week that the Creative Commons license was upheld in Dutch court. And for the record, Your Honor, we also have a new DealBITS drawing, a great MacNotables podcast on email clients, and a slew of TidBITS Talk discussions. The defense rests.
MacNotables Podcast on Email Clients -- Few types of software engender the same level of loyalty as email clients. It makes some sense; an email program is the communications lifeline to the world for many of us, instant messaging notwithstanding, and we all end up with a lot of data - messages, addresses, carefully constructed folder hierarchies - in our email programs that would be difficult to transfer to another client
The Ukrainian Mac development firm BeLight Software continues to extend their flock of special purpose publishing programs, adding the CD/DVD labeling software Disc Cover to the collection of Business Card Composer, Mail Factory, and Swift Publisher
Now this is interesting. The non-profit organization Creative Commons offers a set of copyright licenses that enable content creators to grant additional rights beyond those normally provided by copyright law - we publish TidBITS under a Creative Commons license (see "Seven Hundred Issues, a CMS, and Creative Commons" in TidBITS-700)
You may have read that the French are at it again: harassing Apple, and requiring them to open the FairPlay digital rights management (DRM) system used to protect music files sold by the iTunes Music Store
This week, Steve Jobs's Apple Computer and the Beatles' Apple Corps are scheduled to go to trial in England, marking a new phase in a trademark dispute which has clung to both companies for more than a quarter century
The first link for each thread description points to the traditional TidBITS Talk interface; the second link points to the same discussion on our Web Crossing server, which provides a different look and which may be faster.
How to covert a music file to a Podcast? An attempt to make iTunes see an MP3 file as a podcast leads to discussions of how iTunes handles files