Apple’s Jobs Calls for End for DRM-Encoded Music
Tuesday’s essay addressed the actions of consumer groups in Europe, which have called on Apple to open up its “FairPlay” digital-rights-management (DRM) system to allow consumers to back up legally protected music on other devices. Instead, Jobs encouraged those groups to ask the labels to remove their requirements for digitally protected files.
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“Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats,” Jobs wrote. “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.”
According to Jobs, DRM has been a failure, for two reasons: first, due to the actions of a small group of hackers, the protections surrounding protected music – FairPlay and other systems – have been defeated. A key provision of Apple’s licensing agreements with the music companies has been that if its DRM system is compromised and music becomes playable on unauthorized devices, Apple has only a small number of weeks to fix the problem or the labels can withdraw their entire music catalog from the iTunes store, Jobs wrote.
What will consumers do when they finally give up? Pirate, the MPAA has acknowledged.
Second, Jobs wrote, the CD itself has been entirely unprotected, providing an unimpeded flow of potentially pirated songs which can flow straight to the Internet. He did not address various rights-protection systems which have been placed upon the CD, such as the infamous “rootkit” DRM scheme used by Sony.
“The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy,” Jobs wrote. “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.”
