So 16 Robert Santangelo is preparing to sue the RIAA over a law suit they brought against him for illegally downloading music. A little preamble: I’ve always thought it was kind of crappy for people to download music/copy DVDs/steal activation codes, etc. Especially now that you can download a song for a buck off iTunes, stop whining about music prices. Legal music download sites like iTunes and the new Napster have done a lot to combat illegal downloads of music - honestly, that was the perfect direction to go in. But I definitely see why that’s not enough for some people to stop downloading the illegal way.

iTunes led the way in legal music downloads, and provided a cheap service with a wide variety of products. But the methods Apple has been using to go about this with are turning many others away these “easy to use” sites. iTunes is pretty much the only music site I’d trust to give my personal information to - Apple has a very nice monopoly over me in that regard. But I don’t have an iPod. Which means any music I download, I have to burn to a CD and re-import to be able to hear it on my MP3 player. When you’ve got hundreds of songs you’ve bought off iTunes, that’s not a pretty sight. Plus, there was the whole, “let’s not let customers play any old AVI file on their Video iPods - only the ones they buy from us!!!” thing. Completely ruins the point for me.

Apple has pissed me of because of this. I got so fed up over this ridiculous policy (which France was working on, but I don’t think ever got anywhere…) that I ditched my iPod Mini and got a Creative Zen Vision last summer. I’ve gotta say: it’s a whole freaking lot better than an iPod. It was the same price as a 30GB iPod when I bought it, had the same capacity, used swappable batteries, four times the pixels and the screen size was doubled. Haven’t had a problem with it yet.

A year and a half ago, I was thinking about switching to a Mac. But now that I’ve opened my eyes to the vertical integration of their manufacturing process, reminiscent of late 19th Century monopolies, I want to tell Apple to go shove itself up one of their SuperDrive slots.

Oh, and by the way, Apple? Adobe, -so-, does not work better on Macs.