Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Steve Job's letter on DRM
Gentlemen, what did you think of Job's letter about the state of the DRM? A norwegian official already criticized Job's letter, saying Apple was distributing the music, so they were responsible for providing the music free of DRM to ensure customer choice. I just don't understand that - if Apple gets rid of the DRM, in the current climate the record companies will rescind their ability to distribute the music. I don't get why the Norwegian official still suggests that. Any ideas?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I think the best fix would be to have a open standard DRM similar to PGP encryption. That way the music isn't out there in a free for all like in the Napster days and yet allows for the consumer to move their music to any device that choose. But this is in an ideal world. These kind of laws usually get kicked out of the courts in the US because you open a can of worms if you set a precident. If music DRM's must be open and allow for use on any player, does this also apply to software? Does all software have to use the same programming libraries so they operate on any computer? Do all computer chips have to use the same instruction sets so that Intel chips and Motorolla chips are compatable? This then starts to look ridiculous. It would seem better to just let consumers decide if they want to go with one DRM vs another. Because if you want electronic downloads there is going to have to be some DRM in place to protect the content.
I did not read the open letter from Jobs when I wrote my previous post. I have to say, that this is a really well written letter. I didn't think that Jobs actually thought that deeply about the topic of DRM's and music. His logic makes perfect sense when he showed that about 97% of all music sold is with non DRM CD's. Why all the fuss about having DRM's at iTunes or other online stores. I think it is because they know that people would not stand for a DRM for your CD music. And which company wants to be the first to do it and alienate their users. Maybe they are waiting for the CD way of distributing music to fade away. Looks like they will waiting for a long time at the current rate.
Interestingly, the Norwegian officials don't acknowledge Jobs' logic - the idea that 3% of music on an iPod having DRM does not keep consumers tethered to the iPod. I think their argument would carry a lot more weight if digital downloading were mainstream, because then significant fractions of music ownership would be purely in digital form and consumers loose big when switching MP3 players.
The marketing official for the Zune was particularly nasty in his comments!
Post a Comment