This is true, but only for short-term rentals that are being operated in occupancies zoned commercial. In my small town, all of our AirBnB and similar STR's are in residential occupancies, meaning they have never been subject to commercial fire code before the owner started renting them, and have flown totally under the state Fire Marshall's radar. So while you are quite right that the requirements are the same, the onus is 100% on the property owner to meet these requirements, unless the municipality has some way to identify properties operating as STR's–which is exactly what AirBnB is finally providing here.

I'm part of the fire department in my community, and we resorted to looking up offerings in our town on AirBnB and working together as a department to identify the properties by the pictures, all so we could make sure we had pre-fire plans for multi-family occupancies that were popping up in privately-owned homes. While this very well may be a tax grab in NYC, in other communities, identifying STR's is a legitimate public safety concern.

Apple does have a reason to screw up 3rd party video editors, which is that Quicktime is an underlying component of a number of video editing rendering systems, including After Effects. When AE tries to render, it writes to a Quicktime file. The DRM system added to the new version of Quicktime somehow interferes with this process after ten minutes of rendering, locking After Effects out from writing the file and thus crashing the render. So it's not that they tried to break AE, they just changed their software without checking to see if this change would interfere with the other apps that use this software. I do very much enjoy the idea of Apple deciding to boost video rentals by preventing new movies from being made, I doubt that's what they had in mind.

I have to say, putting out a DRM scheme that completely fucks up After Effects is a new low for Apple. Ya, I know, I'm an idiot for installing the thing on my workstation last night without testing it somehow, but you know what? Apple markets these machines specifically as After Effects workstations. I think it's reasonable to expect that they test their software for compatibility with the applications they advertise their machines as being great for. Or if they're not willing to do that sort of testing, at least provide a readily available means of uninstall.