Steve Jobs Gets It

February 7th, 2007

This is one of the reasons I like Steve Jobs. He wrote (or at least published under his name) an article about DRM (Digital Rights Management software) on the Apple web site. DRM is what restricts your use of music or video from playing and copying freely. I have highlighted (boldface mine) the key parts of the following paragraphs:

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

One has to wonder what the Big Four think of this letter. On the one hand, it must piss them off to be called stupid, albeit in such a subtle way. On the other hand, what Jobs says is so blindingly obvious, they should be perfectly willing to be called stupid. They should read this and say, we’re just not doing this right, we overreacted and have required this completely unnecessary system that does not stop piracy one bit and just hamstrings paying customers, and yet we stick with it either through continued panic or just because it’s there.

Of course, I then remind myself that we’re talking about the music labels here, the genius folk which constitute the RIAA. “Stupid” is their business. And the video content producers are not much different.

What Steve Jobs is saying here is, naturally, not a new revelation. Almost a year ago on this blog, I myself wrote about DRM-laden video:

The copy-protect and limitations on which OS, browser, and media players can be used are stupid as hell. We’re talking about movies that have already been ripped and are available for full-quality download over the Internet. So what is the copy-protect protecting? Not a damned thing. People downloading it for free from the Internet can do anything they want with the movie, watch it on any player, in any format. But paying customers hit all these restrictions. Stupid!

So what does DRM accomplish then, as Jobs asks? Here’s another take, again from one of my past blog posts on DRM:

Copy protection is never perfect; somebody always finds a way around it. The only people it really hobbles are the people who buy the product and want to use it legally.

And that has always been at the heart of the whole “digital rights” problem–the makers of the media try to control their product long after they sell it or give it away, for fear that after it is sold, it will be taken and redistributed or resold at a later time. That attempt at control causes problems because it tries to reach criminals by running over legitimate users. …

And that brings up the question of how much right the seller of a product has to follow a product after a sale. Not only for protection against illegal copying, but for control over what happens to a product and how it is used once it is privately owned. Because recent developments have companies using “digital rights management” to do far more than just protect against copying. …

They want to ride the illegal-download horse all the way into your living room, and assert permanent control over the media on the supposed grounds that it might at some point leave your home and go to someone else’s. But you soon find out that it is less about hindering criminals than it is about hindering you, limiting your abilities so you’ll pay them again to do what you should have been able to do in the first place. They don’t just want to control the distribution of the media; they want to control every aspect of how you use the media in the privacy of your home, which is far in excess of their actual rights.

And that, essentially, is what DRM is all about: an attempt to control and limit use so they can sell you the same thing again and again, and/or sell to different people at different prices so they can charge all the market can bear in each separate situation. For them, that DRM-free content is on CDs and elsewhere is not an argument to make everything DRM-free, it is a reason to make all the DRM-free content covered by DRM somehow. The content producers want the opposite of what Jobs is calling for. They have tried again and again to apply DRM to CDs and other media. They are frustrated that it has failed, but they will still try again and again.

Now, you can hedge Job’s remarks any way you like. You can point out that Jobs profits from the iPods and not the music, so the DRM is not as important to him. You can speculate that he’s saying this as a tactic in dealing with European demands that Apple’s FairPlay DRM be scrapped. You might even say that he doesn’t really mean any of this.

None of that, however, will make what he wrote not true. And at least on the face of things, one cannot blame Jobs for the DRM that chains the music sold by Apple to the iPod. Jobs is now on the record as saying that he wants those chains gone. It won’t change the minds of all the critics, but at the very least it’s pretty impressive that someone like Jobs said the kind of thing that he said.

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