Steve Jobs has challenged the music industry to drop its demands for DRM protection on music sold online.
In a statement released today, Steve Jobs has challenged the music industry to drop its demands for DRM protection on music sold online.
He writes,
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.
Many who have grumbled at Apple's apparent support for DRM restrictions will be surprised to hear Jobs continue that "This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat."
The challenge to the "Big Four" (Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI) comes in an extended explanation from Jobs on the background to the current situation (the record companies forced Apple to use DRM) and his proposal for three ways forward.
He clearly favours the option above, but also outlines two other proposals:
- Continuing the current situation which he says (a little confusingly) that "customers are being well served with a continuing stream of innovative products and a wide variety of choices."
- Apple licensing its FairPlay system to competitors so that music bought from Microsoft's Zune store and Son'y Connect store will run on iPods. He worries that this would lead to greater leakage of FairPlay's proprietary secrets, greater hacking and a free-for-all "spread worldwide in less than a minute".
Jobs points out that dropping DRM altogether is not as radical a move as it seems. If the concern is to stop piracy, the 2 billion DRM-protected songs sold online in 2006 is just a tenth of the 20 billion sold without any DRM-protection on CDs by the very companies hammering for DRM. The music industry's conviction that DRM will protect their copyrights is simply misplaced, he suggests.
In a final clever move (and perhaps the reason behind this entire political manoever), he concludes his thoughts by targetting strong European unease over the DRM protection Apple uses:
Much of the concern over DRM systems has arisen in European countries. Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free. For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard.