Posted on 22nd January 2012 in 
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So, I promised my first post would be today, who thought I wouldn’t get to sleep before I made it?…
Regardless, the first post has to do with Apple’s new EULA which has already picked up a lot of flack.
Apple, in this EULA, is claiming a right not just to its software, but to its software’s output. It’s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t freely sell it to Getty. As far as I know, in the consumer software industry, this practice is unprecedented.
Now, the new iBooks app (iBook 2.0 as the app store affectionately calls it) is Apples way of “giving back”/”revolutionizing” the education “industry.” I say industry because the educational system of the US has become no more than a business.
The hype behind the most recent apple release was that it would quickly and easily allow individuals to not only have access to various sources of entertainment and educational material easily and affordably accessible to the masses (A goal the late great Steve Jobs had aspired to for a long while) however, many bored lawyers took to reading the EULA you would find yourself agreeing to if you were to “market your writing” through apples iBooks catalog. Apple could not pull the pages over their eyes as it was soon discovered that by marketing your works through Apple’s catalog, you were giving up 30% of your profits and effective copy rights of the aforementioned works.
This is especially pertinent in my opinion due to the recent SOPA/PIPA protests and their capabilities to take down sites/services featuring copy-written work (no questions asked) however I will not go in depth on this matter as several people have already explained it far better than I could at 5:45AM.
Have you read that article that I just linked? Awesome, then hopefully you’re seeing the correlation at this point, if not, shoot me a message and I’ll make a clarifying post.
Returning to Apple, I believe that this is one of the first traces of Apple’s loss of Steve Jobs. I’m not saying he was a perfect guiding moral compass, but I would argue that he was more tactful in his methods. Spreading education and allowing individuals to pursue their “true dreams” (as corny as that may sound) did honestly seem to be one of Steve’s goals and I feel that in many ways Apple has lost that at its heart. By no stretch of the imagination have they reached a point of no return, but they do need to start checking themselves and soon for it is a very slippery slope to being shunned in the tech industry with geek culture being what it is these days.
All in all, A for effort Apple, B for intent, and D for follow-through.
PS: This post may be subject to edits later (reads after sleep) today.
