The RIAA vs. Steve Jobs

https://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2023/03/24/the-riaa-v-steve-jobs/

by Amorymeltzer • 3 years ago

284 117 3 years ago

weblog.rogueamoeba.com

How exactly would Apple have "disabled" Audio Hijack Pro in 2005?

Nothing like Gatekeeper existed back then, and if code signing was a thing it certainly wasn't in widespread use. Even kernel extensions were completely unsigned until the release of OS X Mavericks in late 2013.

Edit: To be clear, I'm sure it would have been technically possible for Apple to kill Audio Hijack. However, I think it would have required either enormous engineering effort (e.g. replacing third party kernel extensions a decade early) or a completely unprecedented policy change (blacklisting a specific hash or bundle identifier, of an app that wasn't malware). I don't think there's an alternate timeline where Apple would have done either of these things, whatever happened in that meeting with Steve Jobs.

Zak2• 3 years ago

They might have disabled the OS features it depended on to operate, though I have the impression attempting to do that might have made the Mac worse for professional audio production using any software.

EGreg• 3 years ago

Zak, why’d you stop submitting links 10 years ago ?

Wowfunhappy6• 3 years ago

I'm not positive about Audiohijack back then, but I know SoundFlower (which shares development history) worked via a kernel extension. Kernel extensions literally have full read/write access to kernel memory. I'm not sure how you'd restrict something like that.

sandworm1012• 3 years ago

Back then there was occasional software-specific code in many OSs, famously simcity was addressed by name in win95. So it would not be unprecedented for an os to specifically recognize certain software by name. This lives on today in graphics drivers being optimized for specific games. Inside the black box that is proprietary software, they can do whatever they want.

Wowfunhappy6• 3 years ago

Sure, but arbitrarily blacklisting a specific app, for reasons other than malware? I guess Apple could have done that, but—correct me if I'm wrong—in 2005 I think that would have been completely unprecedented, and certainly trivial to bypass.

It seems like a pretty odd request to make of Apple, as opposed to contacting Rouge Amoeba directly.

lapcat5• 3 years ago

There are a lot of bundle identifier checks in macOS/Mac OS X, including in the system frameworks. Apple could have targeted the AHP bundle id to break things. Of course, RA could have changed the bundle id or done other hijacking to make it work again, but it would be a cat-and-mouse game that Apple would probably win in the end, because RA customers would continually experience breakage on OS updates.

Also, the "audio hijacker" was located in a well-known system directory, so Apple could just nuke that directory.

That's assuming Apple really wanted to break AHP. It's unclear how much motive Apple had to follow the RIAA request even before the now famous meeting.

Wowfunhappy6• 3 years ago

Right, and Apple also could have introduced Gatekeeper and co six years earlier than they ultimately did, just for their friends at the RIAA! But it all seems pretty far-fetched. I don't think I believe the alternate scenario would have ever happened.

AdamJacobMuller2• 3 years ago

Apple could have done any number of things to do that. You're thinking about this from the limited perspective of how Apple could have done it that RA couldn't have worked around (code signing) but that isn't remotely required.

All Apple needed to do was to push an update which breaks the software.

if (process == "AudioHijack") { dont_stream_audio();}

AudioHijack would find some way to work around that, as I'm sure they can, the RA team is wicked smart but their software would be broken for a day/week/month until they did and then Apple would analyze their workaround (using their exponentially greater manpower and better understanding of the system and find a way to break it again.

Cue cat and mouse game. The thing is in that scenario, Apple loses nothing when RA fixes their software (they can just tell the RIAA they're trying -- and they are!) but every time Apple breaks Audio Hijack they would be eating away at the userbase and inserting doubt into potential purchasers. Am I going to spend $65 on something which my OS manufacturer clearly doesn't want me using and is probably going to break in a month or three for an indeterminate amount of time.

You're seeing this as "can apple unequivocally disable this software" but that is the wrong question, even today it's not true (I can disable gatekeeper/SIP/etc if I'm determined enough and if I want i'll just run Ashai) but the real game here is Apple making it more difficult to use it and the REAL game would have been Apple instilling doubt in existing customers and potential purchasers.

Anyway I'm glad Apple didn't do that, RA produces some great software.

lapcat5• 3 years ago

Am I going to spend $65 on something which my OS manufacturer clearly doesn't want me using

It was actually much cheaper back in the day, not that it matters much to the argument.

GeekyBear2• 3 years ago

All Apple needed to do was to push an update which breaks the software.

Windows 3.1 famously refused to run on top of Digital Research's DOS.

DR-DOS has problems running windows today, and I assume will have more problems in the future." Allchin replied: "You should make sure it has problems in the future. :-)"

https://www.theregister.com/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_inc...

msla• 3 years ago

How exactly would Apple have "disabled" Audio Hijack Pro in 2005?

Would the courts have cared about the technical details?

Is "That is currently impossible" ever a reason to not do something a court orders you to do?

yjftsjthsd-h• 3 years ago

Would the courts have cared about the technical details?

It is unlikely that a court would have done anything; we had that court case in the form of VCRs, and sanity prevailed.

(IANAL, but the court case that set precedent for "it's not illegal if it has substantial legitimate uses, even if it also allows copyright infringement" seems applicable)

quitit• 3 years ago

The same way that Microsoft was messing with Quicktime on Windows.

andsoitis• 3 years ago

Eddie Cue said: “The RIAA wants us to disable Audio Hijack Pro, because with it you could record any sound off of your Mac, any song, anything”. Steve then turned to me and said: “Do you need this to create these podcasts?”. I said: “Currently, yes!”. So Steve Jobs told them to get lost, and I thought: “Hey man, thanks, Steve’s on my side. That’s cool.”.

So the RIAA didn't have any legal standing and instead used "influence/intimidation" to which Steve stood up?

parker_mountain2• 3 years ago

Steve would have been extremely familiar with the music industry and their legal reach, starting all the way back in the 80s when Apple Corps sued Apple Computers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sosumi

matheusmoreira4• 3 years ago

Intimidation is what these copyright monopolists are all about.

We knew recording was useful, but the app’s ability to apply audio effects anywhere on the Mac carried much less legal peril.

Look at this. Innocent software developers, intimidated by these nebulous "legal perils" of copyright infringement to the point they felt afraid of marketing a perfectly reasonable and legal feature.

I can't possibly be the only person deeply offended by this. We don't need their blessing to record anything. We should be free from their tyranny but it binds us to this day.

alwayslikethis4• 3 years ago

This is why open source software and non-walled garden systems are so vital. With open source software and hardware where you can install your own software, all it takes is one developer somewhere in Russia or China who is not afraid of the RIAA's intimidation, and all of us will have access to the recording in a way that cannot be taken away. We must defend open source software and fight against walled garden promoters (like Apple) to secure our right to general purpose, freedom-respecting computing.

neilv• 3 years ago

Rampant MP3 copyright violation motivated and enabled some awful owner&user-hostile design, from which we're still suffering.

I don't like anything about the RIAA, but a lot of computer users don't have the high ground either.

noirscape• 3 years ago

The problem is that it's extremely risky as a platform operator to stand up for blatant abuse of copyright infringement tools under the current model, especially when you do anything at scale.

Basically if you operate any website, as long as the DMCA request you get is reasonably properly filed, you are required to process it or else you risk legal liability.

It's a goddamn mess and when you're operating on the scale of say, Google, you don't have the option to risk that liability and hire people who can examine those claims. No, what you do is blindly process all claims and just hope that people counterclaim the bad ones.

It's why for example GitHub sticking it's neck out for 1201-related violations (where they manually investigate any anti-circumvention related takedown) is such a big deal. They are running a risk by doing that where if they tell the RIAA (who usually files these requests) to go fuck themselves, that they could be forced to eat crow in court, but they're doing it because well... the RIAA abused that part of the DMCA to file a dodgy claim against youtube-dl[0].

Improper DMCA claims are technically punishable as perjury but the actual process is so draining that it's super rare to see someone convicted for it.

[0]: The RIAA assumes that youtube uses actual encryption to protect people from downloading them. They're wrong - YouTube doesn't use widevine or anything like that for regular uploads (movies are a different case, they do use widevine), they have their own rolling cipher which is just a plaintext javascript file that your browser fetches when loading YouTube. Youtube-dl contains a python reimplementation of that cipher. Fully legal insofar as section 1201 is concerned, but the RIAA filed it under that anyway (because they'd have no actual standing to file a regular DMCA claim for basically blatantly reusing Google code, since the RIAA isn't Goole).

makeitdouble2• 3 years ago

In my eyes the main issue is political standing, which we had very few.

When in France the RIAA equivalent came up with a plan to add a tax to all digital storage media, because it could be used for piracy, the tax was applied an we all ponied up. Why ? because they make money, deal with politicians everyday and make sure the wheels are well lubrificated when they need them to turn.

For a very long time the computer industry had none that, and/or wanted contents right holders on their side, with not enough negociation power.

Now I feel we're on the other side with Apple straight telling legislators to turn a blind eye because they need their semi-monopoly to keep printing money.

Smoosh• 3 years ago

get lost

From Daring Fireball:

According to https://twitter.com/adamcurry/status/1639396942345117696

His actual words were “fuck them”.

orbisvicis• 3 years ago

That's so 90s. Nowadays, ask GPT to write the most dense obscure legalese supporting your contention, at least 100 pages of A4 paper, no margins, font size 9. Have fun emailing that pdf.

pokot0• 3 years ago

I think you forget we used to pay the RIAA every time we purchased a writable CD medium, just in case we might use it to store copyrighted material.

Yes, the legal system we have in place is mostly about bullying and you have every reason to be offended

scarface746• 3 years ago

This is not technically true in the US.

Stand-alone devices that were meant only to allow you to record audio did require special “audio CDRs”. But CD writers that connected to your computer could use “data CDRs” that could still be used to record standard audio CDs

realusername• 3 years ago

That's still how they work nowadays, that's a legal mafia.

tinus_hn2• 3 years ago

A legitimate use case can change legal standing.

musicale3• 3 years ago

Thanks Steve and Eddie. I gladly accept this as encouragement to start using Audio Hijack Pro with Apple Music.

Shame though that they caved and seem to have disabled a video equivalent on macOS.

S_A_P• 3 years ago

I highly recommend this tool to any mac users out there. I use it daily- it makes sampling any inbound audio stream simple and would be much less productive without it. My only complaint is the ACE driver is frequently updated which sometimes causes ableton live to puke if it’s open when the update happens.

Syzygies• 3 years ago

Most Rogue Amoeba software requires an "ACE" extension incompatible with Activation Lock.

CharlesW• 3 years ago

Either you're confused, or I am. System Extensions like ACE require that Apple Silicon users switch to "Reduced Security"¹ rather than "Full Security". It doesn't require disabling Activation Lock².

¹ https://rogueamoeba.com/support/knowledgebase/?showArticle=A... ² https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208987

comex• 3 years ago

Quote from your second link:

On a Mac with Apple silicon, the security policy must be set to Full Security, the default setting.

NovaDudely2• 3 years ago

You know, Steve may have been the architect of modern digital jails but by comparison to what we have today, he looks almost Stallman like! I'm kidding but also kind of not.

rqtwteye• 3 years ago

Absolutely not. He was the trailblazer for walled gardens and locked down systems. He only fought back when it cost him profit. The iPhone pretty much paved the path for systems where the user isn’t allowed to do as they wish and software producers have to go through the one and only distribution path.

NovaDudely2• 3 years ago

Clearly the joke didn't come off. As I said he was the architect of digital jails, it is just that nowadays the folks we have are so much worse.

But yes, under his watch he made the most locked down operating systems and distribution system we had ever known.

scarface746• 3 years ago

Yes, because before ios there were no locked down systems like game consoles since the early 80s…

wmf• 3 years ago

He fought against RIAA/MPAA overreach on DRM but yeah when it came to his app store there was no ripping, mixing, and burning to be found.

detourdog• 3 years ago

one is the consumption of media the other is worldwide interactive media that is unregulated and has the opportunity to abuse the individual.

musicale3• 3 years ago

Where is my video rip/mix/burn? Mostly killed by blu-ray's "bag of hurt" but Apple is also to blame with its anti-video-recording DRM and HDCP annoyances.

PaulDavisThe1st4• 3 years ago

It may be worth noting that Apple themselves did sort of break "record whatever you want" on iOS, just a few years after this suppsed conversation. It may or may not have been intentional: they removed shared memory access from iOS, which broke JACK (and some other similar systems) on that platform. Some other developers did eventually find a different way to accomplish a similar goal, but it had nothing in common with the solutions available then (and now) on macOS and forced a significant code fork for anyone trying to design inter-application audio routing on Apple platforms.

scarface746• 3 years ago

You do realize the security implications of “shared memory access” don’t you?

PaulDavisThe1st4• 3 years ago

Yep, the same implications as on all the *nix related systems (and others) that have had this property for more than 40 years and still have it.

gymbeaux• 3 years ago

Of course iOS and macOS block for example audio in screen recordings via QuickTime so…

yreg• 3 years ago

And taking a screenshot with Netflix opened produces a black rectangle.

bowsamic5• 3 years ago

Rogue Amoeba's software is great but I can't be the only one who finds it absurdly expensive

haunter2• 3 years ago

Pretty much the whole Mac software system. Especially the small things are crazy. Just one example: saw a $30 screenshot app which can also share and upload?! There are better open source apps that does the same and more for free.

People usually defend it as “quality” though but that’s very subjective imo.

tuyiown• 3 years ago

It looks like there is actually a market segment for «luxury» software. I wouldn't buy it either, but I'm not sure I've any strong opinions about it.

If it puts food on the table of someone that might be not writing bleeding edge algorithmic software, but take cares of reliability, system integration, UI designs and UX patterns of a scoped problem to solve, I'll have hard time to be against it.

alin23• 3 years ago

If you're talking about Cleanshot X (https://cleanshot.com/), I'm using that multiple times a day for providing support on Lunar (https://lunar.fyi/) and my other apps through:

    - annotated screenshots* of the app UI (e.g. on https://lunar.fyi/faq#bad-ddc)
    - instant web links to optimized videos of screen recordings, that I can easily paste in an email
        - the Mac recording is usually an uncompressed MOV which you have to spend time and battery to recompress using ffmpeg and upload somewhere

I also use it to make optimal sized and padded screenshots for Twitter and other platforms.

To do that without Cleanshot, I would have to go through an image editing software like Pixelmator, which I use sometimes for more complex tasks, but it's many times slower than select region of screen to screenshot, annotate, Cmd-C, Cmd-V

It saves me way more time than what amounts to $30.

It definitely is relative, if you don't have this kind of need or workflow, $30 seems like too much for screenshots.

* One nitpick I had with it was that the resulting screenshots were not size optimized, so I created a free app that optimizes the app in the clipboard directly: https://lowtechguys.com/clop

airpoint2• 3 years ago

Which free apps accomplish the same and more than the mentioned $30 app?

I annotate screen grabs daily as part of my job and never found anything that comes close to CleanShot X. Would love to hear what's new and worthy on the market!

lapcat5• 3 years ago

This is why they've been in business for 20 years.

bowsamic5• 3 years ago

I know a lot of people who refuse to buy it out of principle

LoganDark• 3 years ago

Loopback and Audio Hijack were two of my most used apps on macOS. Wish I could still be using them today, but my Mac broke...

musicale3• 3 years ago

It may be difficult to imagine, but in 2023, the simple right to record video on your computer was not well-established.

The RIAA vs. Steve Jobs

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