Apologies if AtAT feels a little out of whack today, but we feel strangely... unsettled right now. We're not sure what could be causing it, but it's sort of a general edginess, a keyed-up feeling like we should be preparing for some unnamed momentous occasion or something-- as if a life-changing moment were bearing inexorably down upon our lives, and we should be preparing to give ourselves over to the sheer enormity of whatever's hurtling toward our destinies. There's an anticipation of shock, joy, and utter absorption, but as far as we know, nothing's happening this week that should be triggering this sort of mental and physiological response. Laundry day? Dental cleaning? Semiannual tire rotation?!

Oh, wait... Macworld Creative Pro starts today, doesn't it? Right, right... we get it now: this is all just phantom anticipatory giddiness because our bodies are used to being bathed in an extra-strength Reality Distortion Field at a Stevenote right about this time of year. But of course, what with Apple having decided that it's allergic to the East Coast, the summer Macworld Expo Stevenote won't be happening this year or, most likely, ever again. Yeesh, what are we supposed to do with all this extra nervous energy? Maybe we'll knit an afghan or something.

Still, the renamed show is happening this week, Stevenote or not (meaning, not), and there's still a little to look forward to if you're there. First of all, this marks the "first public display" of the Power Mac G5, which means you can meander over to booth 618 and soak up a nice, healthy dose of perforated aluminumy goodness a solid month before the display models make their way into the Apple retail stores. And secondly, His Steveness may not be addressing his loyal subjects this week, but Sir Joswiak of the Order of Veeps will be flapping his gums at the "Feature Presentation" on Wednesday. Give him a shot and you just may be witnessing a star in the making.

That said, if you ask us, the summer show just isn't Macworld Expo anymore. In fact, you don't have to ask us; you can ask WIRED instead, who has an article on the apparent demise of what used to provide the Mac fan's entire supply of adrenaline during the hot season. And last month the Boston Herald reported that IDG Expos would consider this week's "retargeted" show to be a "big success" if it drew 29,000 attendees-- meaning, half of what last year's summer Expo pulled in. Holy shrinkage, Batman!

Still, we're doing our part to keep the illusion alive. Some viewers will recall that there's a longstanding AtAT tradition whereby viewers attempt to spot Nico (AtAT's semi-intern and perpetual matrimonial sacrifice) in the Expo crowd and propose marriage to her; the origins of this odd ritual stem from an ancient practice known as Viewer Mail and have long since been lost in the mists of time, but it's tradition nonetheless. If you're attending, keep one eye peeled for the blushing potential bride-to-be, and if you propose real nice, you may just pick up a wife to carry your plastic bag full of cheap promotional material. Of course, it's far more likely that she'll shoot you down and laugh mercilessly, but hey, at least it might score you some free AtAT merchandise or something from the Baffling Vault of Antiquity™. (There are copies of Duke Nukem 3D in there! Ooooooo!)

Attention, overseas Mac-using music fans: are you still stewing over the fact that we Ugly Americans here in the U.S. are the only ones with access to the iTunes Music Store? Does it irk you to no end knowing that we and only we have ridiculously easy access to over 200,000 songs, obtainable with a single deft click of the mouse at the low, low price of just 99 cents a tune? Do you refuse to accept the fact that the iTMS is actually an insidious and addictive blight on American society, draining funds from otherwise fiscally responsible citizens at what can only be described as a crippling rate? Well, don't worry; you'll all know the Joy of the Single-Click Download (and the accompanying Horror of the Cumulative Massive Debt) soon enough. Some sooner than others.

We'd already mentioned that Apple doesn't expect to get its licensing issues hammered out in Europe anytime soon, so the iTMS for that continent is delayed until sometime next year (meaning, Europe, that your economy gets a brief reprieve from this unstoppable monetary vampire). Canada, on the other hand, may not be quite so lucky. According to the Globe and Mail, the Canadian Recording Industry Association (think RIAA, we suppose, but with more hockey fans and a real flair for teen melodrama) will have "completed negotiations to set up a framework for paying music publishers and composers whose music is downloaded on pay-for-play systems" by "mid- to late September." Once that's all smacked into shape, "U.S. systems such as Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes 'music store'" can work their magic north of the border.

Note, however, that just because the negotiations will be done in September doesn't mean that the framework will be. For all we know, it might be another six months before the iTMS is live in the Great White North; personally, we figure it'll be running long before that (we assume that the legal negotiations take a lot longer than the actual implementation; the article hints at "the fall"), but we just thought we should mention the possibility, so that our faithful viewers in Canada don't spend all of September repeatedly clicking "Music Store" in iTunes in hopes that it'll suddenly spring to life. There are better things to do with your time. Like, say, Aleph One.

So, to recap, Canadians may not have to wait too much longer to send their life savings to Apple 99 cents at a time. Or, uh, with the exchange rate, make that $1.36 CAD at a time. Hmmmm... somehow "$1.36 CAD a song" doesn't have quite the same ring to it. But fear not; the marketing folks will get that all hashed out in plenty of time for the iTMS to nuke the entire North American economy by mid-2004.

Speaking of the iTunes Music Store, how 'bout that "FairPlay" digital rights management stuff, huh? For what it's worth, FairPlay seems a lot more, well, fair than the DRM used in any other online music systems; you can play a purchased song on up to three Macs (many Windows-based services limit you to two systems), you can burn it to discs as often as you like (other services typically have a burning surcharge [oooh, that's gotta hurt] on top of the monthly subscription fee), and you can stick it on all twelve or thirteen of those iPods you might have sitting around (other services typically prevent you from putting the songs on a portable player at all). So, yeah, it bugs us that it has to be there at all, but we've pretty much made our peace with it.

There's just one little problem: the main reason we've made our peace with it is because FairPlay can be stripped completely out of an iTMS song by the cumbersome but effective act of burning the song to a CD-R and then re-importing it into iTunes. (We use this method to convert our music into unprotected MP3s; sure, we lose a little quality, but at least we can play our purchased music via our TiVo, while the FairPlay/AAC-friendly version of the Home Media Option is still in the works.) But MacBidouille (by way of MacRumors) appears to be murmuring about "stricter DRM" in the upcoming iTunes 5-- specifically, something to work around that workaround.

If the rumor is true, then iTunes 5 might include additional DRM technology from Verance which would smear a supposedly-inaudible "watermark" on any audio CDs burned by iTunes, signalling any Verance-aware software (like, say, iTunes) that it's not allowed to re-encode any music on that disc. Meaning, you can still burn as many discs as you like, but those discs are protected in the sense that you can't get the music back off of them. Well, at least not in iTunes; MacRumors makes a good point, which is that any non-Verance-aware encoding software should be able to rip tracks from the CD just fine. Which means that there'll be a workaround to the workaround of the workaround.

And this is the way that DRM always seems to move: it becomes more and more annoying to honest people trying to use their songs/ebooks/whatever in legal ways, whereas dishonest people will always find a way to steal what they want no matter how much protection is slathered on top. But hey, that's what makes it so much fun! Assuming this all shakes out as rumored, we eagerly await Apple's workaround to the workaround to the workaround of the workaround.