Being a playa hatah

The first time I heard of ”player hater” was about four years ago when Sean showed me the Star Wars Gangsta Rap viral video. If you somehow missed that, you need to watch it. If you’ve already seen it 100 times, one more won’t hurt. 🙂

Gizmodo reports the hate for a different sort of player, the iPod and iTunes Music Store. This hate appears in the form of the never-ending Apple v. Apple lawsuit.

Everything old is, well, old again

The strange thing not mentioned in this article or the linked article or even the linked linked article is that the only thing new here is the trial date.

By this I mean, that actually, Apple Corp has sued Apple Computer over this very thing about the time iTunes Music Store went to the PC almost three years ago. In response to this, Apple lawyers combed over all things that might infringe and changed a tab on Apple’s website from “Music” to “iTunes” and finally “iPod + iTunes:”

Apple website tabs on May 29, 2003
Apple homepage tabs on October 5, 2003
Apple’s “Music” tab

But we are poor students of history.

Pot, Kettle, and Blackness

Truly the most amusing thing about this is the Inquirer article linked. It refers to Steven P Jobs as “L. Ron Jobs” and glosses over the details of their legal battles in a way that shows this person is clearly a Beatle-lover and Apple-hater.

The fact of the matter is that the London Times article is more reasonable. Apple never technically “lost” a lawsuit to Apple Records—they would have but both times previously they were settled out of court. While we do not know what the details are of the settlements, the last settlement cost Apple $26.5 million and probably puts Apple Computer in the catbird seat. According to BusinessWeek:

“Although that pact remains private, key portions of it are cited in public court papers. And one of those passages in the court document strongly implies that Apple Corps agreed to allow Apple to pursue digital music initiatives, but not package, sell, or distribute any physical music materials such as CDs.”

But please, Andrew Thomas of the Inquirer, don’t let the things like a modest amount of websearching stop you from showing off your religious zeal by ridiculing the supposed religious zeal in others.1

Back to that player hater thing…

According to the Urban Dictionary, a Player Hater is:

someone who dislikes or resents or disapproves of a player (the term is used to criticize people who are jealous or who don’t respect successful people).

Looks like some people are hating “L. Ron Job”, him being a “player”, him having created two music players, and the fact that those are themselves “player.”

Now that is some truly awesome player hating!

1 To pick an even smaller nit, “Sosumi” was not one of the “first musical sounds made by an Apple computer,” it’s not even one of the first musical sounds made by a Macintosh. It’s just a system beep added to Macintosh System 7 that Apple Corp objected to. Apple played a similar prank on Carl Sagan.

3 thoughts on “Being a playa hatah

  1. Note: I made a major edit. It appears some people may not believe that Apple changed their tabs so I edited the post with a visual history of them. In the course of doing so, I mistakenly called the intermediate tab “iPod” instead of “iTunes” and corrected that.

    There are two errors I didn’t correct in the article. The first is that my timeline of events is not correct. Here is the corrected timeline.

    2003-04 First rumors of Apple v. Apple surface.
    2003-06Apple replaces the “Switch” tab with the “Music” tab.
    2003-08 Apple changes “Music” tab to read “iPod” (they also changed http://www.apple.com/music to http://www.apple.com/itunes).
    2003-09 Apple v. Apple goes public.
    2003-10 Apple iTunes for Windows launches.
    2003-11 Apple changes tab from “iTunes” to “iPod + iTunes” (they did have it briefly as “Switch” again.

    2006-03 Apple v. Apple lawsuit goes to trial and idiot pundits with an axe to grind act as if this is a new thing.

    The other error can be construed from the timeline. It is equally possible that Apple changed their urls and branding from “Music” to “iTunes” in order to brand iTunes for the iTunes for Windows release. (Of course, why they continue to use generic names for “Pages” and “Keynote” and their recent switch of branding to pushing heavily the “iPod” and “Mac” brands has me thinking such a marketing brain fart still has the cart leading the horse.)

    I apologize for the errors.

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