Thoughts on Steve Jobs’ Desire to Abolish DRMs
In a surprise and welcome move, Steve Jobs has posted an article, Thoughts on Music, on the Apple website explaining Apple’s position on Digital Rights Management (DRM) of music purchased online and what it would like to see in the future. For those who think Apple is a megalomanic corporation focused on making money, Steve’s essay will surprise—he calls for the abolition of DRM.
“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.”
Is this all just a ploy to polish Apple’s latterly tarnished public image? No and yes. Even though it is obviously how Apple feels, Steve’s writing and posting of this essay is definitely a response to negative press and blogging that has painted Apple as the bad guy of DRM.
Steve makes several points:
- “Apple has concluded that if it licenses FairPlay to others, it can no longer guarantee to protect the music it licenses from the big four music companies.”
- “DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy.”
- “In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves.”
- “Much of the concern over DRM systems has arisen in European countries.”
- “For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard.”
Regarding music sold on unprotected CDs, the record companies—Sony BMG in particular—have experimented with copy protection of CD-based music and so are still keen to plug that hole. If they do, then Steve’s call to abolish DRM will lose its clout.
In arguing against DRMs, interestingly he argues that Apple can’t license FairPlay to others, as FairPlay’s secrets would be compromised, meaning the need for it to be modified. FairPlay can already be easily removed from a song by anyone with a CD burner, and yet nothing has been done to prevent that.
Given his position as CEO of Apple, it is no surprise he doesn’t mention how easy it is to remove DRM using a CD burner. I’ve done it myself so I could load and play music I legally own on my Palm—just as I can do with any music I bought on CD. Makes you wonder, though, how much music that floats around peer-to-peer music sharing systems is actually bought off iTMS. Probably more than we realize.
Today there are three main levels of piracy:
1) People making unauthorized copies of music for their own listening;
2) People sharing copyrighted music through means such as peer-to-peer and burning CDs;
3) People or businesses illegally reproducing and selling copyrighted music.
It is the third that affects the music industry the most, despite claims that it’s the second, which is just because those people are an easy target. In fact, as it’s a form of viral marketing, many musicians nowadays support the idea of people giving copies of their music to friends, with some even actively encouraging it.
But at all three levels DRM can be very easily circumvented. I hardly doubt Apple’s FairPlay—or any other DRM system—has any noticeable impact on any of these forms of piracy of music obtained from online music stores. As Steve said, DRMs haven’t stopped piracy.
So what else is in it for Apple if DRMs were abolished? Consider Steve’s apparent contradiction where on the one hand he states his fear of losing music on the iTMS:
“. . .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.”
But he then goes on to argue how iTMS purchased music is insignificant in the scheme of things:
“Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. . . since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music.”
Despite the latter assertion, the former carries the truth that iPod sales, despite an average of 22 songs per iPod, would be greatly impacted by the loss of music sales on the iTMS.
Apple gains great leverage off the iTMS and has never made a secret of the fact that it is a vehicle to sell iPods. Steve and Apple clearly believe that discontinuing DRMs would not reduce iPod sales, and you might suspect they even think it could be good for iPod sales. It would also clearly be good for music sales; however, Apple has always stated that it makes nix off music sold on iTMS.
Steve’s article also demonstrates the power Apple now wields. He is obviously confident that, although it might upset a few record company execs, at the end of the day he has got them singing his iTunes—except on the DRM issue.
This is a significant move by Apple and one aimed squarely at the European countries who have been laying the blame for DRM on Apple. Fresh from winning the battle with another European giant of the music industry, Apple Corp, hopefully Apple will also win this battle and we will be able to buy all our music DRM free.
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I just read a brilliant article at Macenstein that more or less proves that Jobs is full of baloney with his sanctimonious pleas about DRM.
http://macenstein.com/default/archives/526
Money quote: If Apple truly believes that removing DRM from music (and presumably movies) will create a multi-industry boon in sales, why not carry it over to their line of software? Why not make Final Cut Studio available without a serial number? How about Logic? Shake?
You can’t run Final Cut Studio without a Mac (and you need fairly new and expensive one to really run it well). Why wouldn’t Apple want to sell more Macs? And think of all the cost savings, once Apple doesn’t have to spend all that time and money encrypting their software DVDs and coming up with new software license keys. (Or at least, I assume it is expensive, since Steve pretty much used it as the sole reason the music industry would ditch DRM).
“But Apple would lose money!” I hear you saying. Well, would they? Not according to Steve. You can’t run Final Cut Studio without a Mac (and you need fairly new and expensive one to really run it well). Why wouldn’t Apple want to sell more Macs? And think of all the cost savings, once Apple doesn’t have to spend all that time and money encrypting their software DVDs and coming up with new software license keys.
Interesting, Hadley. Do you want to elaborate? Do you think they won’t buy Steve’s PR, and still consider Apple the bad guy of DRM? Or is there another angle you expect Apple can be attacked on.
(Not even the USA.)
If anything, Chris, corporations dominate American policy more than European countries. The credit card industry LITERALLY wrote our new bankruptcy laws, which unsurprisingly benefit the credit card industry.
We’ve been enacting more and more draconian copyright laws while the EU is actually challenging Apple - that would never happen here.
Do you think they won’t buy Steve’s PR, and still consider Apple the bad guy of DRM?
Not to answer for Hadley, but I don’t see how Apple’s PR move changes anything. While the labels might require DRM, they do not prevent Apple from licensing it to competitors or making the iTunes songs and the iPod itself more interoperable.
why not carry it over to their line of software?
Why not make their Macs, while you’re at it, FREE for the taking?
Your (or Macenstein’s) proposal is so ridiculously flawed. What you are saying is to give Apple’s renowned applications free of charge to whoever wants to install them. You claim that all Apple want anyhow is to sell hardware and what better way to accomplish that than giving the software free with every new hardware sold.
I’ll admit this idea is intriguing but let’s look a little closer. You want Apple to sell the razors while giving away the replacement blades. A la inversed-Gillette or HP in printers. Say what? Did you notice the flaw there?
Let’s apply that inversed logic with Macs, shall we. If people spent a whole lump of cash on a Mac (the razor or printer) would they keep lumping their cash for new Macs on a yearly basis just to keep getting those sweetened free software (blades or toner ink)? Maybe. In Gillete’s or HP’s case, Whoa Nelly, why not! Not with Macs unfortunately.
And what of those just-obsoleted Mac owners numbering in the millions that have to keep up with those yearly free apps just to run them respectably? Are you thinking these Mac users are idiots and can’t smell the rotting stink if Apple adopts this flawed business model? Now, what if you are one of those just-obsoleted Mac owners. Does it smell like a bouquet of roses?
Well then, these socialistic ideals might work on someone’s unintelligent mind incapable of deep analysis but will never work in reality - business reality, that is.
So why then would Steve propose such a tectonic shift in online content distribution model?
Come to think of it, DRM-free content online? Has Steve gone nuts? Is he now betting that his iPod and iTunes have amassed enough clout in the industry to fend-off would-be competitors in a “lock-free” landscape? I truly believe they can as long as Apple maintains its design lead.
That is really Apple’s main weapon over everyone else. The hardware and software design teams are one-of-a-kind. They work flawlessly together. You can’t say the same with MS’s or Dell’s or HP’s any day. Those folks can create one or the other but rarely achieve a feat that is the norm du jour with Apple’s products. Even the G4 Cube and G4 iMac were fantastically designed in and out.
As for the content being DRM-free on iTunes. Keep in mind, Apple does not own the content. It doesn’t make a dime (literally) for providing the service for the labels. It’s the labels that make the majority of each take. We knew that before haven’t we? And it’s the labels’ choice (now we know) of blessing online content with draconian DRM systems.
So, what would happen in a DRM-free world? The labels’ income from iTunes would, theoretically-speaking, increase exponentially as it becomes the hotbed for every portable players out there.
Why I say this? It is because the Reals, the Creatives, the MTV Urges, the Amazon UnBoxes, and Wal*Marts out there SUCKS! Only iTunes jukebox/store gives the music fan every choice he/she could ever want with a jukebox/store.
What of subscriptions, you ask? Well, DRM-free content and subscription models do not mix very well, does it? It might even be combustible. Imagine a million tracks you can freely burn. That would definitely be a paradise like Eden - it’s forbidden. The labels are not idiots, although we know they are dumb with DRMs.
I think you misunderstood Beeb’s comment, Robo.
Macensteind said “Why not make Final Cut Studio available without a serial number?”
That is,*not* free, but only free of a system that requires the user to enable the software by providing a serial number.
I thought it was a very good analogy and quite provocative.
That is,*not* free, but only free of a system that requires the user to enable the software by providing a serial number.
Right on the money, Chris, as per usual.
Again, if one takes Jobs at his word, he should WANT to sell his software free of DRM.
IF one takes Jobs at his word.
Remember, Macenstein is simply using Jobs’s own argument to illustrate how insincere Jobs truly is about DRM. If you ridicule their argument about software, then you are ridiculing Jobs’s argument about songs.
Frankly, I buy the argument about removing DRM, that it wouldn’t hurt sales and would ultimately benefit Apple by increasing hardware sales - but I don’t buy Jobs’s call for getting rid of DRM and his total blame-shifting to the labels. Too many other Apple products, and even indie-label songs for that matter, are DRM-ridden with no prodding or pressure from any outside entity.
I think you misunderstood Beeb’s comment
Apologies, sometimes posts from Bbx can be dazingly confusing. Anyhow, I am still keeping my stance on the inverse “razor and blades” analogy, mind you.
Analogies aside, music DRMs and software activation schemes are not one and the same. Activation schemes protect a $499, or whatever ungodly upfront costs these days, from being compromised and made freely available. Activation (or serializations) varies from one software app to the next.
DRMs protect media content that usually cost a feeble compared to big software suites like FC Pro, and such. DRM from one content to the next is static - never changing as long as the foundation is not compromised.
Applications software are products in themselves like hardware you can hold with your nimble fingers. Their value is inherent in their development - time, design, perspirations, etc. Applications software are not wrapped in a shell layer we call DRM. Their active locking mechanism do not encrypt the payload as in media DRM schemes. Therefore, applications software are DRM-free, just not activation-free. Big difference.
Media content, meanwhile, have values embedded in the desirability of the actual content and not the medium. The content is intellectual by its nature. This content is wrapped in a shell we call DRM and it is mostly passive by design. The active part being in the jukebox or the player.
If Macenstein, and their cult, calls for Steve to do to his software apps what he wants to do to music, then they obviously making up faux analogies to daze and confuse people more than actually helping settle the argument.
DRM on music and serial number registration for multi-hundred $ software are two completely different beasts. Anyone who compares the two as being equivalent is ignorant of the economic realities of the two very different markets.
Serial numbers / software activiation is put into place to protect companies (like MS, Adobe, Quark, Apple, etc) from *professional* pirates. We’re talking about those people who sell a shrink-wrap look-alike copies of Windows / Photoshop / Final Cut / other multi-hundred $ packages at cut rate prices because they are selling copies they created themselves (packaging and all).
While software activiation doesn’t prevent this completely, removing software activation from these software suites would create an explosion in these professional piracy operations because it would be that much easier to sell fakes for even the non-technically inclined.
Professional pirates don’t put pirated music online—there’s no profit in that. They press their own CDs for over-the-counter sales. Online pirated music comes from people like us sharing music libraries on P2P networks. Comparing the different kinds of piracy situations is like comparing an elephant and a platypus. They may both be mammals, but that’s where the similarity ends.
Software makers already suffer huge losses do to these kinds of piracy operations. Removing activation completely for programs like Final Cut would spell the death of any profitability for the software division at Apple (or any other software company for that matter).
Remember, we’re not talking about a sub-$100 piece of software here—we’re talking about expensive software suites with costly R&D budgets that need to recoup that investment with a large price tag.
Would you also advocate Aspyr remove all product activation from games on the Mac? That would quickly spell the doom of what little Mac gaming market there is and Aspyr would quickly go under.
The reason DRM is unneeded is that it has become simpler to buy a $1 track from iTunes (or eMusic or wherever) than it has to find a quality track on the P2P networks and download it. DRM doesn’t protect from “professional pirates” because they don’t pirate music online since there is no profit there. DRM doesn’t protect from people who rip their own CDs. All it does is prevent you and I from using our music we purchase online wherever we want, hence, even Jobs knows DRM doesn’t prevent piracy, and the best thing for iTunes and the rest of the music industry is for record companies to not require DRM. If he believed otherwise, wouldn’t he just sit back and be quiet?
Yes, he wants to keep iTunes in the EU markets. But he also can nog sell non-DRM music due to contracts with the record companies. Do you also suggest he drop every single large record company catalog from the iTunes store?
Concluding that Jobs is secretly DRM’s staunchest supporter because he doesn’t also advocate removing serial numbers from software suites is like concluding that the elephants lay eggs because a platypus does.
I think your missing the points.
DRM was REQUIRED to have the iTune/iPod infrastructure. If a music label is gonna release their digital content to a service provider there gonna want two things, Money and Security.
Apple’s DRM has worked because they control both ends, Server and Client. However Apple didn’t impose DRM, the labels did and that’s what he’s explaining in his letter. Apple has NO CONTROL as to wether or not they can Dis-DRM the music, that’s up to the labels.
There beating on the messenger not the sender and need to wake up. If Apple wasn’t in the dominant eye we wouldn’t have this problem but due to the common greed in current politics worldwide we have issues.
Don’t want DRM? Go buy it somewhere else, your iPod will play it. What, they don’t sell Warner, BMG… Well maybe that’s the problem.
The ONLY difference (in terms of music DRM) is that MS agreed to pay Universal a piece of the Zune sales.
I think this might possibly be the most naively self-delusional thing anyone has ever said.
Microsoft’s entire music strategy rests upon, is centred on, and consists of DRM. Whoever doesn’t understand that, should possibly consider sewing their fingers together in order to prevent the nonsense they will inevitably spew forth from infecting the internet.
I’d just like to go on record as Beeblebrox’s official spokesperson and say how wrong it was for Steve Jobs to write this intelligent critique of DRM in digital music.
I don’t think it was wrong. He was merely explaining the situation, although not as clearly as some people need it stated.
He’s the man of the hour, the spokesperson for a large multinational corporation, and the face behind the whole situation. He needed to come forth on it and did.
I would beleive Apple lawyers had more to do with DRM then he did. But in the end the labels would have never turned over the content without it and probably never well, espeically if digital downloads take over hardcopies one day in gross sales.
And I know if your not making a dime on DRM but have to pay programmers and researchers to keep it going he could move them to another project they’d probably want to do, which incurs no extra expenses to gain in productivity.
I’d also just like to go back to basics for a second and say that what’s wrong with DRM is not actually that it came from Satan’s loins in sinful coitus with Steve Ballmer, but that in its current form it prevents interoperability, which contravenes what Good Folk consider fair use.
Thus the real issue here is that *acting against fair use* is bad, which is why DRM is bad.
In the light of which, the degree that Beeblebrox’s “insightful analogy” stretches rational thought becomes clear.
First I’ll re-reiterate, just for kicks: contravening fair use is wrong, not limiting piracy per se. In music, DRM contravenes fair use by disallowing interoperability.
In Apple’s software, DRM is used to prevent programs being copied easily by users for use by other users. It is *not* used (except by Microsoft, perhaps) to force individuals into iniquitous situations where they have to buy a new copy of, say, Final Cut when they replace their aging powerbook with a new mr. sexay iMac C2D, ooh aah.
Needless to say, the idea that Jobs’s critique of DRM that directly infringes proper interoperability & fair use is hypocritical because he supports DRM that does not do so, falls flat on its face. Into a blender.
Of course, a complete and utter idiot might say that apple’s lack of software interoperability with say microsoft and linux constitutes the same thing, but it would not take more than a moderately intelligent hamster to realise that this criticism would apply equally to MS, the linux world, and all software developers who don’t develop for every system ever made, and is, well, just totally retarded.
...the idea that Jobs’s critique of DRM that directly infringes proper interoperability & fair use is <u>hypocritical</u> because he supports DRM that does not do so…Ben
Implementing the labels wishes, DRM in online content, results in limitation, and in some cases neglect, of the fair use doctrine. And you are right, Ben. This DRM battle is all about fair use and not one of piracy (of course, this one is the labels’ favorite defense of DRM).
Steve, in his coming out party for freeing DRM, does not paint him as hypocritical, as one would think. If he was reluctant to begin with (without an option, I might add) and then comes out clean for everyone to sniff and criticize, then I wouldn’t call that hyprocitical.