Apple CEO Steve Jobs has written an interesting essay, “Thoughts on Music“, in which he explains why Apple has refused to license its FairPlay DRM scheme, and calls out to the music industry to end copy protection. Jobs also points out that the vast amount of music on iPods is DRM-unencumbered, and argues that the 3% of music on iPods which is DRM-encumbered is hardly enough to lock users into the iPod platform.
It will be interesting to see the fallout from this essay, both from the music industry (which has recently shown signs of re-thinking DRM), and the European countries like Norway, which has declared Apple’s DRM illegal.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 4:10 PM and is filed under AppleTalk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I couldn’t agree more with Mr. Jobs. The DRM situation doen’t apply to just music: it’s going to cut into television programming and movie download in online stores aswell. If Apple doesn’t lisence certain production houses Microsoft’s Zune store will, then we’ll be FORCED to choose between movies that we love and Zunes that we hate. If the DRM policy gets killed we will see a sh*t ton of new content on online stores everywhere, not just iTunes.
I have to say Steve Jobs deserves major kudos for speaking out on this issue. I just hope the “big four” actually listen & accept that things need to change.
At least we will not have to deal with all those wankers that bitch about DRM.
More content? I think this will mean more format converters proliferating and the DRM craking software remaining stagnant.
I would imagine that as long as the labels require Apple and the others to have the DRM, Norway and anyone else who doesn’t like it will lose their online music stores.
I can see this going two ways. Either the people will petition their government to reverse the ruling on DRM so they can have their legal online music back. Or they’ll do as Jobs suggests and petition the labels to get rid of DRM.
Either way, it’ll be up to the consumers to decide how this plays out.
I have to agree with the “being locked in” issue. I still have a good 50 or so WMA files that are nigh useless to me that are left over from when I switched back to the Mac platform after college. Being able to switch and take all the stuff with you for effectively the cost of a CD isn’t a bad deal.
Apparently Universal Records has already spoken out against removing DRM from internet downloads by saying that DRM is “essential to competitive advantage, and combatting piracy”.
EMI is the largest label rethinking the DRM approach publicly and they haven’t made a decision yet. I am of course happy to continue purchasing from the iTS regardless of DRM encumberment of my purchases, but it’d be nice to know if Apple would provide a utility to remove the DRM from the files purchased prior to any decision to remove DRM. Does that make sense?
Anyway, I agree with some of Steve’s thoughts, though I feel some of it is fluff, some of it is redirecting of criticism, and most of it is truly altruistic in motive.
WHAT!?!? end copyright protection!
Is this guy for free markets? not paying people for stuff? does this guy have a brain? or does he hate musicians?
maybe i don’t quite understand fully what’s going on here?
Its not “ending” copyright protection exactly, its only saying that if music companies would allow DRM free music, like all the CD’s they make are, it would allow for more companies to jump into this bandwagon and allow for a more open market. As Steve said in the article, if 90% of their music isn’t protected, what would that small percentage of protected software do?
It’s essentially showing that DRM is useless. It’s not effective in the first place because 90% of music on your music player is probably pirated anyway, so why even bother? It’s a waste of time and money.
As a norwegian patriot, I just wanted to add: Go Norway! But it’s nice to see that the spearhead of digital music commerce is saying no to DRM. It proves how, as stated, cumbersome it really is. But until it is efficiently removed, I’ll stick to my CDs.
It’s about time someone u[ top in business spoke out against DRM, it’s one of the most annoying, inneffective things ever used to combat piracy.
Apple just announced DRM-free music from EMI.
A step in the right direction.
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