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February 7, 2007

humor

Exclusive: Fake Steve talks DRM, Beatles, and his open letter

Posted Feb. 7, ’07, 12:08 PM PT by Mac User
Category | Apple » Humor

Fake Steve Yesterday’s open letter from Steve Jobs on Digital Rights Management created quite a splash in the Intertubes, but nagging questions still remained. And, my friends: questions need answers. Naturally, there was only one person we here at MacUser could think to truly help us plum the depths of Steve Jobs’s mind. That person?

Steve Jobs.

Unable to get anywhere with Apple’s official channels, we instead contacted the man through his Secret Diary, where he blogs under the clever nom de guerre of Fake Steve—proving that, as with computers and music players, the best pseudonyms are elegant in their simplicity. Fake Steve answered questions about everything from Norway to Bill Gates to the record labels in his trademarked frank and forthright manner (a manner which, reputedly, Cisco has accused him of stealing).

MacUser: First off, why write an open letter at all? Why not go to the labels directly?

Fake Steve Jobs: You’ll be shocked to learn this—I know I was—but many of the top execs at music labels cannot read. They need to have others read things and then explain the meaning to them. Have you ever met Lyor Cohen? Scary.

MU: Who was the target audience of your letter? Was it a shot across the bow of the record labels, a way of telling the European Union to back off, an appeal to consumers, or something else entirely?

FSJ: Basically I wanted to remind people that we’re the good guys in all of this. Okay? We’re the ones with the cool ads with attractive ethnic-type people of color dancing in suggestive ways. We are all about diversity and freedom. We’re not into DRM. We’re into music. I get up every morning and ask myself “How can I make the world a better place?” That’s what drives me. Not money. I’ve already got way too much money. Heck, I could wipe my butt with hundred dollar bills and not care. I’ve actually done that. The butt thing, I mean. Was totally liberating.

MU: You basically urge the “big four” music companies to drop DRM as a requirement for licensing digital music. Obviously, such a move would be great for Apple and consumers alike, but how feasible is it? Would these companies ever really just drop DRM?

FSJ: Dealing with these guys is like dealing wth the Corleone family. I blogged recently about how much I hate having to breathe the same air as they do. Honestly, I get hives after our meetings. It’s the worst part of my job besides having to endure Jerry York’s dog breath. Basically they are total morons. You and I both know DRM sucks. Bad as it is, it’s the best we could get out of them. And you can’t believe how much work we had to do just to get even this much. These people are just total boneheads.

The fact is the labels will only change if they start to get hurt financially. Which is why I think, frankly, that the best thing people could do would be to stop buying music on iTunes altogether. I know, it sounds radical. But that would show the record companies. I’ll tell you a little secret. I never buy music from iTunes. Not because of DRM. But simply because it sounds like s***. The format we use compresses the data and the music sounds awful. CDs are bad enough, compared to vinyl. But they’re a hell of a lot better sounding than the stuff we sell on iTunes.

MU: What do you think about the idea of the government regulation of DRM? Are the actions of Norway and other countries helpful in the long run, or should the market sort itself out?

FSJ: First of all I friggin hate Norway and we have totally declared war on them. And tell me this. Why is it that all these freako hacker type guys always come from Scandinavia? Jesus. Is it something in the water? This DVD Jon guy just really bugs the crap out of me. And it’s not just the Scandinavians. Now the rest of Europe is jumping in too. I think there’s a reason why Europe has fallen behind the United States economically, and these guys represent the worst of it. Protectionism, over-regulation, gimme-gimme-gimme. They can pass all the laws they want. All it will accomplish is they won’t get any music. Fine by me.

MU: You claim that people are not “locked” into Apple’s music devices, however this is not quite an accurate model: certain iPod owners buy the majority of their music from the iTunes Store, others buy none. Thus, some users are locked into Apple with hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars of music purchases. What do you say to these users?

FSJ: You know not whereof you speak. Friend, I bow to the Buddha inside you, but if you don’t like the iTunes business model, don’t buy your friggin songs on iTunes. Nobody is holding a gun to your head. Jesus! If this service sucks so much, why are so many people using it? Why are these Linux freaks forming a petition to beg us to port iTunes to their crappy operating system? Is it not obvious that iTunes must be doing something right if so many people are using it? Is this not something that a child running a lemonade stand would comprehend? I mean, it’s not like we’re selling all those songs only to retarded people who don’t understand the terms of the purchase.

And let’s be honest about something else. Underneath all the sanctimonious crap about how evil DRM is, at the end of the day what these agitating socialist f***wits really want is just to get stuff [for] free. It’s like the kids in college who lobby for making hemp legal because it makes such great clothing and strong rope. Riiiight.

Now, I don’t like DRM. I think it’s stupid and I’d be glad to drop it because I know we’d still sell as many songs, probably way more, if we didn’t have to use it. But at the same time let’s get something straight. When you buy a record or a CD, you are not buying that music. You don’t own that music. All you’ve bought is a physical device that plays that music until the container wears out or breaks. Some of the DRM rhetoric is akin to people buying a vinyl record, playing it for a while, and then when it breaks, going back to the record label and saying, “Hey, I already bought this music once, so gimme another record to replace this one that I broke. Why should I have to buy it twice?”

Get this straight because it’s an important point. You’re not getting a perpetual license when you buy a record. You don’t have any constitutional right to free music. Look it up. I did. there’s nothing in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence about it. You can go all the way back to ancient Rome, to the Magnum Carta, and you’ll see—nothing there either.

Musicians and record labels can do whatever they want with their music. If they want to make it a s***ty purchasing experience and piss people off, so be it. Ultimately the only recourse you have, really, is to not buy their music.

MU: You and Bill Gates are two of the most powerful people in both technology and digital music. Have you given any thought to approaching Bill and asking him to work with you in convincing the record labels to drop DRM?

FSJ: I’ve thought of approaching Bill, stealthily, like a ninja, from behind, with a very large knife in my hand. I’ve thought about that a lot. Yeah. And you know he’s been begging me to run Microsoft for him. But I’m like, Sorry dude, it’s your mess, you clean it up. But to answer your question: No, I don’t want to work with Bill on anything.

MU: Finally, you recently struck a deal with Apple Corps to end all of your legal disputes, so how about it? Beatles on the iTunes Store?

FSJ: You’ll see the entire Beatles catalog on iTunes in the near future. And there’s a special extra too. Can’t get into it right now. But Paul was just here in my office and we were listening to The White Album (on vinyl, of course) and going over our plans and we both agreed, this is mind-blowing stuff. Like game over kind of stuff. Like they’re going to redesign cities to accommodate it.

That’s all I can say for now. Peace out.

MacUser Co-Editor Dan Moren and Senior Contributor Scott Silverman contributed to this piece.


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