Alright, alright...let me be clear about a couple of things, goons, since my question wasn't taken the way I intended.
I didn't ask the question from any sort of self-righteous, indignant and baiting position (I typically save that for certain threads over in AppleOutsider
), nor do I give any real damn, one way or the other, about that specific topic from any moral standpoint.
I was mostly interested in just the tech-related reason. I simply assumed the Beatles and their reps wouldn't put out such a cool, novel thing in a "wide open", easily duped way. But maybe they did, and I've just come to expect more of a hassle when dealing with these types of products (and expect some sort of ballbusting DRM or "songs can only be accessed and played when the apple is attached to your computer" catch).
If it's free and open, that's great. I'm still not buying the thing, but it's great.
But, just to be thorough, I'll answer Noel's question:
"Nothing."
However, you have to agree that a little USB "apple" (with their entire library already digitized into a decent, high-quality setting) certainly makes the sharing/stealing/whatever angle
much easier (and convenient!) than individually ripping/encoding 14 CDs and keeping up with who has which disc among all your buddies.
If my best friend comes to me and says "I've got everything the Beatles ever recorded...do you want the 14 CDs or this little cute apple, where they're already digitized?", guess which one I'm lunging for?
That's what I was getting at...even though they're only making 30,000 of these, I'm guessing they're going to wind up in about eleventy zillion homes and computers if these are unprotected mp3 or other files, right?
