Naturally, this upset Murderdrome's creator Paul Jason Holden, who called — "infuriously," we suppose — for action on his blog: "PLEASE leave a comment. We’ll forward ALL of these to Apple, so that we can ensure that not only Murderdrome, but that ANY comic submitted to Apple doesn’t fall foul of the same censorship." (Do hyperviolent comic book authors also always go by three names?) By this morning, tech-news aggregator Techmeme was dutifully full of sympathetic retellings of Infurious's plight.

Not here though. We'll only make the obvious point that we'd never heard of the Comic Reader app, Infurious Comics or its just-plain-gross comic Murderdrome until now. Publicity for being banned worked commercial wonders for even James Joyce's unreadable Ulysses, so we bet it helps Mr. Holden's gore-porn sales just plenty.

There's no one big reason. This WSJ report lists several:

• ITunes, with few exceptions, requires that songs be made available separately. Some artists see their albums as one piece of work, and don't want them dismantled.
• Their handlers believe they can make more by selling complete albums for $10 to $15 than by selling individual songs.
• Apple isn't willing to sell songs for more than 99 cents. Most record labels see higher prices as critical to increasing revenue.

Specifically, the "3G" part of "iPhone 3G." Patrizio writes that "on disabling 3G, service improved immediately. There were no more dropped calls. Audio quality was fine. Battery life was much better." An analyst tells Patrizio a chip inside the phone is the problem: "We believe that these issues are typical of an immature chipset and radio protocol stack where we are almost certain Infineon is the 3G supplier." Patrizio's three other problems with the iPhone:

• Steve Jobs's kill switch:
  

  Jobs confirmed if you install applications unapproved by Apple, the app will be removed as soon as you plug it in to synch and recharge. What would happen if Microsoft did this?

• Cracking cases. After The Unofficial Apple Weblog reported "Cracks 'appearing' in new iPhone 3Gs," they updated their story to write:
  

  Commenters are literally pouring in to tell us that as careful as they've been with their iPhone 3Gs, even the most babied devices are showing cracks.

• App developers are angry over NDAs. Developers building apps for the iPhone have a hard time helping each other out because Apple forces them to sign strict non-disclosure agreements. The response? FuckingNDA.com.

It will be a fad, why? because Jobs has a very narrow mind regarding software, and that means we won't see the kind of cool stuff that PalmOS used to get in the late '90s/early '00s.

The iPhone-as-modem app just got canned, and that was way more useful that most of the crap on the store. Ask any gamer and he'll tell you that using non-physical buttons (like in some DS games) is a nightmare.

After the peak hype, only 10-20 percent of the user base will be buying (instead of just getting the free ones) apps in the store.

Apple only gets to keep 30 percent of that cash — so we're really talking about adding $100 million to Apple's multibillion-dollar bottom line. Jobs said the point isn't for Apple to make money off application sales, but to market them as only available on Apple hardware. "We think, going forward, the phone of the future will be differentiated by software," said Jobs. Videogames maker Sega told the Journal its sold 300,000 copies of Super Monkeyball at $9.99 a pop. "That's a substantial business," Sega exec Simon Jeffery said. "It gives iPhone a justifiable claim to being a viable gaming platform." With all this cash changing hands, we wonder: Why would anybody build widgets for Facebook and not the iPhone?

It has every media component you could want, and they're all married together in a platform. That means other artists could use it, other record companies could use it and gain the knowledge of our 15-year development curve.

If you doubt the man's seriousness about screwing around with technology, check out this live 1982 performance of the vocoder-driven "Sample and Hold." See? Those old analog vocoders beat the pants off T-Pain's digital auto-tuner. At the JavaOne conference, Young eagerly extolled the virtues of the entertainment industry's production standard of 96kHz, 24-bit digital audio.

Why do golden-ear types like Young hate MP3s? The format results in lower dynamic range, lossy compression artifacts and is thin in the upper frequencies. Digital audio also produces harsh even-order harmonics and not the odd-order harmonics which add textural timbre to chords, and integrated circuit amplifiers have a high noise floor because of radio-frequency interference. Even young consumers prefer the sound of analog hi-fi systems like Jackson Pollock's. (Photo by Andrea Barsanti)

Scarcity. Viewers can access NBC for free from their TVs, NBC.com, Hulu.com, and, oddly enough, from their iPhones. Other than an ongoing trial in Wisconsin, HBO shows aren't available on the Web and viewers even have to pay to see them on their televisions. And isn't the difference between NBC's Crime Scene and HBO's The Wire worth paying extra for?

While most indie albums sell in small numbers, indie labels collectively account for 27.5 percent of total music sales worldwide; when banded together, they represent one of the largest labels on the planet.

As Defamer points out:

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes cited a 60%-70% profit margin during a VOD trial for Warner Bros. films on cable — more than twice the return on Time Warner DVD rentals.

It's called radio, and more recently, music videos. In both cases, record labels basically paid to promote album sales — either through payola, in the case of radio, or through seven-figure film budgets, in the case of music videos. The content itself was given away for free. Thankfully, digital tools make recording and mastering that much cheaper as well. The only change in thinking (and artist contracts) required is to see the recordings themselves as a loss leader for stuff you actually can sell, like tickets and T-shirts, fan club memberships and licensing rights.

The new MySpace Music, like industry-backed efforts with MusicNet, PressPlay and Bertelsmann's Napster, is doomed to failure because the labels persist in seeing recorded music as a profit center, not as a promotional platform for leveraging artists' brands. Of the four majors, only EMI hasn't signed on with that effort yet, and if former Googler Douglas Merrill has any sense, he'll tell the company not to bother. (Photo by AP/Peter Kramer)

No, this is about the twisted dynamics of the music industry. Selling unprotected MP3s is all the rage now, even though label executives have insisted for years on copy-protected formats, like the kind Apple sells through iTunes. Forget Jobs's propaganda about Apple wanting to "free" music from copy protection. He doesn't care one bit about the digital-rights management software, or DRM, that record labels insist on. And he knows that most consumers don't care about the issue. He just wants to sell iPods, and his customers just want to buy them.

What Jobs does care about is other music stores having something Apple doesn't. The labels have been favoring competitors like Amazon.com with licenses for MP3 files — because they now fear Apple more than they fear piracy. And Jobs knows that DRM doesn't work to stop piracy, anyway. But what it does do is lock music to devices, because hardware manufacturers can't risk breaking the DMCA's circumvention provisions.

So Apple needs a new hook to win the labels back. Selling subscription music would allow Apple to lock down its music once more. According to reports of the proposals Apple and the labels are considering, iPod buyers would pay anywhere from $20 to $100 to get all the music they can download. Ah, but they'd have to download it from iTunes, onto an iPod.

Bundling music would give Apple a huge edge over the competition. Nokia's also proposing an all-you-can-hear music plan. But for all of Nokia's talk about cell phones replacing MP3 players, only 7 percent of cell-phone owners listen to music on their handsets. Amazon.com could try a subscription plan, but it's hard to see how it would make money, since it doesn't have the iPod's hefty profit margins.

Jobs comes out on top, again. Apple sells more iPods by giving the record labels what they want — copy protection and revenue — without having to share the iPod's profits. The compliant tech press corps will hail his plan as genius, forgetting he ever said anything about consumers wanting to own their music. The losers here are the musicians. Apple and the labels will divvy up subscription revenues, and the artists' cut will likely be smaller than what they'd make off of by-the-song sales. But since when has anyone asked their opinion about how to run the music business?

(Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)

Truth is, last summer, Zucker not only asked to set pricing, he demanded that Apple share some of its hardware revenues. Jobs said no. Zucker's subsequent public statements suggest the fact that this rebuff actually surprised him. Now we know why. Yesterday, Zucker told the students at Harvard that before its dismissal, NBC shows led the iTunes video market with 35 percent share. In the metaphorical physics of most businesses, that's called leverage. In Cupertino, that's not enough to let you touch Steve's iPhone.

In addition to selling audiobooks through Amazon, since 2003 Audible has been the sole provider of audiobooks through Apple's iTunes store. Details of Apple and Audible's deal have not been made public, but we doubt that it will be renewed when it expires. For Amazon, this a bit of a broadside against Apple. Amazon launched a DRM-free music store last year and managed to sign up a number of record labels which have thusfar refused to offer DRM-free music on the iTunes store. The music-store arms race shows no signs of cooling down.

But what about the iPod, the natural destination for Audible's audiobooks? The Kindle, Amazon's recently released e-book reader, has a bare-bones MP3 player and could be a possible delivery mechanism for Audible's wares, as it has a wireless Internet connection built in — EVDO, not Wi-Fi, so it works almost anywhere.

Amazon is serious about digital distribution — and has a chance to challenge Apple's dominance in this market like no other digital store has.

Two things. One, fanboys might be drooling over the MacBook Air Steve Jobs announced last week, but studio bosses like those at Zucker's Universal are more excited about movie rentals on the remodeled Apple TV. And two, entrepreneurs seeking quick cash might consider taking on Zucker in a game of Texas Hold 'em.

Up north, they're already charging by the bit. According to Bits, under Bell Canada's bandwidth pricing plan — one which Time Warner it is looking to as a potential model for its own — customers would pay $30 each time they rented an HD movie from Apple TV, on top of Apple's $3.99 rental fee. Even with gas prices where they are, driving to Blockbuster suddenly looks much more appealing.

And DSL Prime editor Dave Burstein told Bits the effect such a surcharge would have on Apple's new movie rental business is every bit intentional. "The smart people at Time Warner are scared of people watching TV directly over the Internet," he told the Times. "'Lost' and 'Desperate Housewives' look better over the Internet than they do on digital cable."

A Time Warner spokesperson denied the charge. "This is not targeted at people who download movies from Apple," Time Warner PR flack Alexander Dudley told the Times. "This is aimed at people who use peer-to-peer networks and download terabytes."

Formerly, Netflix customers were limited to one hour of viewing per dollar they paid in monthly subscriptions. They now have access to 6,000 movie and TV titles online, with unlimited viewing. (By contrast, Netflix has 90,000 titles on DVD.) Unlimited, that is, except for those folks paying $4.99 a month to rent two DVDs at a time. But those cheap bastards get what they deserve.

Jonathan Todd, the commission's antitrust spokesman, states:

Contrary to what we had been led to believe, the fact that the same content is not available in all EU countries is not the result of restricted business practices between Apple and the record companies, but of the restricting copyright legislation.

Some will view Apple's statement that it "will reconsider its continuing relationship in the UK with any record label that does not lower its wholesale prices in the U.K. to the pan-European level within six months," as bullying. But this is the reality: If anyone has the clout to force changes in the music industry and its regulatory regime, it's not the European Commission. It's Steve Jobs, savior of iPod users everywhere.