Ex-RIAA prez Hilary Rosen slams Apple in The Huffington Post (commentary in Corante -

Good Morning Silicon Valley). This is the same Rosen responsible for harassing a generation of music lovers.

Hilary, I grant that the concepts of a free market and competition may be alien concepts to you. The RIAA oligoply is known for abusing the market, embargoing P2P, co-opting government (successful) and judiciary (mostly a failure), fighting innovation, anti-competitive court convictions, and just outright lying and silliness. Still you might like to know that there are dozens of portable music players on the market. That means you don't have to buy an iPod. You can enjoy someone else's player. And still drool over Jobs all you want.

You write:

I spent 17 years in the music business the last several of which were all about pushing and prodding the painful development of legitimate on-line music.

So you should be some kind of expert, right? Then why is branding and basic economics foreign to you? That's how Hollywood lives. You invest to build stars. You create and deploy franchises. You milk these assets to recoup your investment and earn a profit. Economics 101. Now that's ok for the entertainment industry but not Apple?

Why don't you know about loading mp3s onto your iPod, a perfectly fine way to fill your iPod? Or Apple history? They've done quite well with a proprietary approach for 20 years. Or digital media player history? There is a long line of proprietary software and hardware players. The iPod is no different.

Are you really that ignorant? ... or are you acting a role you know well, that of the visible public shill. I agree with Richard Bradley. Who are you fronting for now? It doesn't seem quite like the Human Rights Campaign, where you were last sighted. Who is the evil empire under your mask?

Marc Freedman
RazorPop, developer of TrustyFiles, the leading multiple network P2P file sharing software
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