The most interesting Mac news today is from no less than Steve Jobs himself, author of an extraordinary short essay about the state of DRM in the music industry. It’s extraordinary not just because of what he says, but also the mere fact that he’s saying it this way. He must really have wanted to get this off his chest.
In the essay, Steve reveals some surprising details:
However, a key provision of our agreements with the music companies is that if our DRM system is compromised and their music becomes playable on unauthorized devices, we have only a small number of weeks to fix the problem or they can withdraw their entire music catalog from our iTunes store.
He’s also refreshingly candid about the nature of the DRM business:
The problem, of course, is that there are many smart people in the world, some with a lot of time on their hands, who love to discover such secrets and publish a way for everyone to get free (and stolen) music. They are often successful in doing just that, so any company trying to protect content using a DRM must frequently update it with new and harder to discover secrets. It is a cat-and-mouse game.
What’s more:
And Apple might benefit by charging a small licensing fee for its FairPlay DRM. However, when we look a bit deeper, problems begin to emerge. The most serious problem is that licensing a DRM involves disclosing some of its secrets to many people in many companies, and history tells us that inevitably these secrets will leak.
Finally, Jobs makes his point, and it’s the simple truth:
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.
Apple doesn’t care about DRM. Apple sees no benefit in it. If the the big four music companies could collectively see the light and agree to sell downloadable music DRM-free, just as they sell music on CDs -
Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.
What’s Steve telling us with this open letter? Several things, I think:
- He’s really annoyed with the music industry right now
- He’s fed up with people moaning about iTS DRM - it’s only there because the stupid industry insisted on it. He’s tired of having to defend something he thinks is a waste of time
- He wanted to say this now, to get it out in the open and get the discussion started. It couldn’t wait until the next keynote
Further comment on this:
If Apple is serious about wanting to sell unprotected music, then I’d be interested in know why it’s not doing so for bands and albums that have already answered Jobs’ request in the affirmative.
But Jobs thinks this is unfair: customers are served well in the current market, by competing manufacturers, each with their own “top-to-bottom” proprietary systems, he argues.
So, his argument goes, Apple must keep FairPlay as an Apple-only solution in order to meet its obligations to the labels.
Why does the music industry fear DRM-free downloads? They fear file-sharing, of course–piracy. But that’s silly, because piracy is well-established by this point; we’ve had almost a solid decade of high-volume media piracy. The vast majority of the songs that you can find on iTunes and the other services are available through file-sharing networks, if you know where to look. And for every pirate site or technology that’s destroyed by a phalanx of intellectual-property lawyers, two more sprout up in its place.
And my two cents? If songs from the iTunes Store were free of DRM, I’d suddenly become a willing, loyal and frequent customer. Until that day, I’m still buying CDs, and wishing they didn’t take up quite so much space.
Q. As Ian Betteridge says - why is FairPlay applied to artists that sell unprotected MP3 files on other stores (emusic, PlayLouder)? What better way to drive the majors to embrace MP3 than making it clear only certain labels/artists want it.
I don't quite buy the 'consumers would be confused' lark. But I presume the devil is in the detail of those agreements (i.e. the majors want all music on iTMS to have DRM, not to be seen as the bad guys).
So who's the intended audience here, European bureaucrats, or the record labels?
I thought he missed an opportunity for a Typical Apple Moment by failing to point out that the non-DRM'ed content on an iPod might also come from the user him- or herself, such as a song created in Garage Band or a podcast created in Soundtrack?
My biggest fear with Apple and the DRM issue was that Apple truly enojyed the position they had with it. They could claim they were forced to do it by the record companies, but not really fight it too much since there were obvious benefits to the system (the "lock-in" myth and the effective method of freezing out competitors). So long as they maintained a dominating market share of the media player market, DRM only played to their advantage.
This open-letter makes me feel relieved that it doesn't appear to be the case. It appears that Jobs wants to squarely put the responsibility of the DRM system on the shoulders of the music companies and publicly state that Apple is willing to do away with it when given permission.
Yes, there may be a lot of self-interest in taking this position at this time, but it doesn't change the simple fact that Jobs has stated: Apple ... will ... sell ... DRM-free ... music ... if that is an option given to them by the major record labels.
This is a very ... very ... important promise that has been made.
I'd still prefer Bleep.com, because they sell 320 kbps MP3s instead of 128 kbps AACs.
They have the new Bloc Party album right now for £8.
Oh yeah: this statement seems pretty obviously aimed at fighting negative PR from the lawsuits in Norway, and wherever else it was over Apple's iTunes "monopoly". It is nice to get the "Apple doesn't like DRM" message straight from the horse's mouth, but I don't think that'll get rid of DRM on its own.
In regards to Ian Betteridges comment, I wonder if it's a technical issue? The DRM is applied to the tracks at the time of purchase, not when the tracks are prepared for the store. So perhaps the process of applying the DRM is not setup on a per track basis but on a Store-wide setting? Maybe not, but it's a possibility. Moreover, the fact that the DRM is applied at the time of purchase shows that the iTunes Store can deliver non-drm tracks as soon as it is legally allowed to do so!
I htink we're all thinking too much like geeks and not enough like consumers. This is what Apple does best. If some of the tunes for sale on ITMS were DRM-free and some weren't, this would cause greater hassle for the non-geek consumer (try and drag 250 songs to a friend's iPod or Zune and 50 of them won't copy because of DRM). Greater Hassle is what Apple exists to prevent. That alone is reason enough to make it an all-or-nothing proposition.
This essay by Jobs is extraordinary. He must be *really* pissed at the majors.
If Steve Jobs really feels this way about DRM, why isn't he making Pixar's movies available to purchase DRM-free through iTunes? He may not be able to control the major record companies, but he can surely control Pixar.
I, like you, still buy CDs because iTMS MP3s sound like having your nuts....well crap basically!
You neglect to mention Steve's point about iTunes/iPod lock-in which is the major gripe we see again and again in the press, and the crux of the monopoly arguments in Europe. Steve claims that only about 3% of the music on the average iPod is protected by DRM. My own and my children's iPods lend credence to that argument. No-one is locked into an iPod unless they cannot find a way to replace less than 3% of their music collection. If anything the removal of DRM would probably increase the percentage of music on the average iPod that comes from iTunes. So obviously Steve would love to see DRM go away.
However the movie industry has a history of adding protection to their video tapes, and discs and also of protecting their markets by the use of region encoded discs. And they do not want DRM to go away anymore than they want people copying DVDs. They are very afraid of eroding their huge margins. And some of these companies are the same ones forcing DRM on the music downloads. So for them to back down on DRM for music will be very difficult because it will make DRM for video that much harder to justify. In fact they are probably very sorry that they do not have protected CDs.
If these companies were to back down on audio, then Steve could very likely force the video issue as well by using the assets of Pixar and Disney to advantage. This could get very interesting.
Er...except I've heard of DRM or copy-protection for CDs. Some publishers tried it, there were compatiblity problems with some players, the copy-protection could be circumvented with minimal effort, etc. That's why CDs don't have it.
Don't like Apple's iTunes DRM? Buy the songs on iTunes, burn them to a CD Image (you can burn a playlist several times, no matter what songs are in it), and re-rip as DRM-less MP3 files. Easy peasy and completely allowed by iTunes. It's probably at worst the same hassle of dealing with those plastic disks.
The problem with burning to CD and re-encoding is that you lose some quality. Re-encoding an already encoded file causes more loss. The iTMS encoding is already lossy enough-- no need to add to it.