Apple’s 1984 Macintosh advert is a classic of modern advertising, and it nailed the countercultural appeal of both Apple and personal computing: in Apple’s hands the computer was an agent of liberty, bringing everybody freedom, opportunity and really nice stuff. Is today’s Apple more Big Brother than liberator?
Take the license agreement for iBooks Author, Apple’s new ebook creator. The agreement says that when you make an ebook in the program you have two choices: give it away, or sell it through Apple. You must not create an ebook in the program, export it as a PDF and sell it elsewhere. That’s bad news if Apple decides not to approve your book, because if it doesn’t you’ll have to redo your book from scratch in another program.
If you want to publish to non-Apple bookshops, Apple is under no obligation to make that easy -- but it doesn’t need to make things unnecessarily difficult either. I think that’s what it’s doing with its license agreement: it’s essentially saying to authors that it’s Apple’s ball, and Apple’s taking it home. Imagine if Final Cut X did the same for movies, or GarageBand for music.
Apple, often rightly, believes that Apple knows best -- so, of course, it assumes that you’ll use Apple’s tools to publish to Apple’s store on Apple’s operating system on Apple’s hardware. The next step, though, is to stop you from doing things Apple doesn’t approve of. That’s what I think happened with iBooks Author, with Apple adding the no-rivals clause because it’s decided textbooks shouldn’t cost more than $14.99 anywhere. By making its tools iBooks-only, Apple can stop authors doing something it disapproves of.
The same thing happens every day in iOS. Take the iPad, for example. It’s a wonderful tablet, but unless you jailbreak it you can’t install anything that Apple hasn’t approved for the App Store. That hasn’t exactly eliminated crappy apps, of course, but it does mean the likelihood of installing anything dodgy or downright dangerous is effectively zero. It also means Apple can decide what kinds of content are appropriate, and block anything it disapproves of.
Would that work on the Mac? It already has an App Store, and an approvals process. Could Apple lock down OS X like it does iOS in the name of security and quality? In the short term the answer is no, but if the tablet is the new PC -- which I think it is -- then personal computing could become more tightly controlled than ever before.
I love my iPad and would rather fight angry bears than lose it, but when a firm has Apple’s unprecedented combination of paranoia and power it’s worth being wary of how it uses its power, no matter how well intentioned. “We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory thoughts,” Big Brother boomed in Apple’s 1984 ad. Apple’s job is to take a hammer to that, not to build it.
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Gary Marshall has been writing about technology since Apple was in trouble. His novel is top of the prestigious “Books by Gary Marshall” chart.
messenger666
March 12, 2012 at 3:15pm
How is this any different than so many other brands?
FaceBook and Twitter claim ownership of photos that users post.
The IOC has complete control of EVERYTHING Olympic, to the point of trying to get Olympic Mountains in Washington state to change thier name. Olympic athletes cannot talk to media, tweet or blog while participating at Olympic games.
Monsanto takes farmers to court for using seeds from plants that are grown from Monsanto seed.
