The iPhone Ringtone Debacle

I’ve always been confused by the whole ringtone business. The notion of paying $2.50 or more for a 15-30 snippet of song, which you may already own, is absurd.

Last week, Apple threw their hat into the ringtones extortion racket with the release of iTunes 7.4.

In order to get ringtones onto your iPhone (from iTunes) you have to first buy the original song and then on top of that you have to pay for the ringtone for an additional 99 cents. In addition to these restrictions, not all the songs from iTunes are available for ringtone download and probably worst of all, if you want to create a second ringtone using a different part of the same song for which you’ve already paid for you have to pay again.

Rather than regurgitate what’s already been written on the Internet regarding this subject, I’ll point you to John Gruber’s complete treatise on the this subject in his article The Ringtones Racket_racket.

The entire article is brilliant but one of the best parts is:

The distinction between ringtones and songs is an artificial marketing construct. It is a misconception, albeit a widely held one, that there is any foundation in copyright law for this, i.e. that an honest consumer is obligated to pay for ringtones separately from “regular” songs for some legal reason. Not so. Copyright attorney Nilay Patel dispelled this notion last week in a piece at Engadget. Patel points out that, oddly enough, even the RIAA agrees:

Well, the RIAA wanted to be able to distribute ringtones of its artists without having to pay them big money to do so (surprised?), and it won a decision last year before the Copyright Office saying that ringtones weren’t “derivative works”, meaning they didn’t infringe on the copyright of the songwriter.

So if you have the right to play a song, you have the right to use it as a ringtone on your phone. There’s no reason to feel one iota of guilt about using tools like MakeiPhoneRingtone or iToner.