In an exchange between Phil Tripp, a music media com­men­ta­tor, and Tel­stra Cor­po­rate Affairs man­ager Craig Mid­dle­ton, it’s revealed that the record companies/distributors are just like the rest of us.

Craig Mid­dle­ton said this:

No I am not say­ing iPod users can down­load directly into iTunes. But they can down­load and burn CDs. With a CD there is no need to ‘engi­neer’ any­thing with iTunes — although it is ille­gal to rip from CD onto iPod. As the Syd­ney Morn­ing Her­ald once pointed out there is no legal way to use an iPod — but that makes a lot of us crim­i­nals
:-)

Then Phil Tripp (albeit under a pseu­do­nym) fired this back:

And I’m one of the biggest crim­i­nals around with a suc­ces­sion of three gen­er­a­tions of pods with 11,000 songs on one now and a hard drive with 26,000 songs – but all legal from my own record collection.

SO what you sug­gest I do is use a PC to down­load songs legally from BP, then burn to CD and then I can trans­fer these over to an iPod. KEWL! You got me. Any chance that BP is going to do the 99 cent down­loads again for Novem­ber if iTunes launches?

Tel­stra pulled out the lawyers.

Phil sug­gested that Tel­stra encour­ages cus­tomers to cir­cum­vent its dig­i­tal rights man­age­ment pro­tec­tions. In fact, Tel­stra in no way advo­cates or con­dones this type of action by cus­tomers. Trans­fer­ring Big­Pond Music down­loads from a CD to an iPod or other device is an infringe­ment of copy­right. It is also a breach of the terms and con­di­tions that cus­tomers agree to when they sign-up to use Big­Pond Music. Craig made this clear in his email to Phil by say­ing “it is ille­gal to rip from CD onto iPod.”

Tel­stra is extremely dis­ap­pointed that Phil chose to mis­rep­re­sent his exchange with Craig on the themusic.com.au website.

That is, of course, assum­ing smi­ley faces have absolutely nil seman­tic value. Bull crap. (I try to keep this site clean, and that’s prob­a­bly one of the stronger exple­tives I’ve used here. This deba­cle irks me, lots.)

Tel­stra, just like the rest of us, fully recog­nises what con­sumers will do with DRM’d media. Namely, what­ever the hell they can and want to. No-one reads “terms of ser­vice” for B2C ser­vices, unless they’re secu­rity para­noid (I’ve been known to, but only when I really don’t trust a source – cer­tainly not because I’m afraid of pros­e­cu­tion!), and dis­trib­u­tors know it.

Record com­pa­nies are a bunch of ostriches, it’s true, so maybe they’re the only ones who haven’t cot­toned on to this fact yet. This whole DRM thing is a mas­sive façade to con­vince the record indus­try they do, in fact, have some con­trol over the dis­tri­b­u­tion of their music. Here’s some news: they don’t. You prob­a­bly didn’t hear it here first.