Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs made big headlines yesterday with his “Thoughts on Music“, an open letter to the entertainment industry concerning the future of digital copy protection.
In his letter, Jobs outlined the three possibilities he sees for Digital Rights Management technology (DRM, copy protection). These three possibilities are:
- Every digital music retailer continues to use their own copy protection. Content purchased from one service is incompatible with every digital music player except the one supported by that service.
- Every digital music retailer agrees to use the same copy protection technology, e.g. Apple’s FairPlay DRM.
- We forget about copy protection and sell music unprotected.
What caused waves was that Jobs says Apple supports option 3, and wants to sell unprotected music.
“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.”
Apple is the largest online music retailer, accounting for 70% of all digital music sales.
Two articles by the BBC on Job’s letter (here, here) hit on the same theory as to why he’s taken this stance. A number of European countries have been putting pressure on Apple to make its iTunes content compatible with other digital music players besides the iPod. Apple doesn’t want to consider sharing its DRM technology with other companies because they don’t consider it possible to effectively coordinate such a large copy protection effort and still keep up with the speed at which these technologies can be circumvented.
Jobs doesn’t seem to think it’s likely that we’ll see a bulletproof copy protection scheme anytime soon. The core architecture of digital copy protection requires keys that allow licensed computers to play the music. Each licensed computer holds, somewhere, they keys to unlocking its music, and so those keys can’t be hidden forever.
Steve Jobs doesn’t think that Apple can make content from the iTunes Music Store compatible with other players besides the iPod, and protect that content at the same time.
Whatever his motivation may be, I applaud Job’s suggestion to eliminate Digital Rights Management technology. DRM is anti-competitive, monopolizing, and detrimental to the rights of consumers. Consider the current state of affairs, as described by Jobs:
“Music purchased from Microsoft’s Zune store will only play on Zune players; music purchased from Sony’s Connect store will only play on Sony’s players; and music purchased from Apple’s iTunes store will only play on iPods.”
This is a sad, sad situation. Could you imagine if CDs sold by Target worked only with Target-brand CD players? What if DVDs from Best Buy would only play on DVD players and televisions manufactured by Best Buy? Apple’s research shows that only 3% of the music on the average iPod was purchased online, which tells me people really do realize what a sad situation this is. They won’t jump through DRM’s hoops, and so they stick to buying unprotected CDs and importing them to their iPods.
I’m proud to say that I’ve never puchased a DRM-protected audio track, and I never will. Hopefully Jobs’ letter is a sign of things to come, and I’ll be happily purchasing digital music from online stores sometime in the near future.
