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February 7, 2007

itunes_store

Every Steve Jobs action has an equal and opposite reaction

Posted Feb. 7, ’07, 6:53 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | iTunes » iTunes Store

Steve's LetterWe’ve got something meaty coming on Steve Jobs’s open letter later today so stay tuned. For now, I thought I’d take the opportunity to highlight some of the responses that have popped up since yesterday’s “shot heard round the digitally rights managed world.”

John Markoff at the New York Times gets the reactions from the a bunch of other players:

A senior executive at one [record] company, who requested anonymity to avoid straining relations with Apple, said that while labels might experiment with other forms of copy-protection software, “we’re not going to broadly license our content for unprotected digital distribution.”
Hey guys, see this? This is the bag. That, way over there, is the cat.

Along the same lines, the RIAA has either perfected a “selected hearing” technology or they’ve been turning the volume on their iPods up way too loud:

“Apple’s offer to license FairPlay to other technology companies is a welcome breakthrough and would be a real victory for fans, artists and labels,” the Recording Industry Association of America said.
That’s not what he sai—never mind.

And, of course, what reaction would be complete without Apple arch-rival Microsoft?

Jason Reindorp, marketing director for Zune at Microsoft, said Mr. Jobs’s call for unrestricted music sales was “irresponsible, or at the very least naïve,” adding, “It’s like he’s on top of the mountain making pronouncements, while we’re here on the ground working with the industry to make it happen.”
If by “working with the industry” you mean “kicking back cash to the labels because of ‘bogus piracy concerns’”, then it seems pretty self-evident why he’s the one up on top of the mountain.

The music and tech industries weren’t the only ones firing back. iTunes challenger Norway responded with the voice of Torgeir “Iron Man” Waterhouse, senior advisor at The Norwegian Consumer Council and man once voted “Most Likely to Get All Up in Steve Jobs’s Grill” (how did they know?):

“Our concern is of course that it’s Apple and [the] iTunes Music Store [that] should be addressing the issue of record companies and DRM themselves if it needs to be addressed - and as we’ve stated earlier it’s iTunes Music Store that’s providing a service to the consumers and therefore has the responsibility to offer up a consumer friendly product.”
A lot of people took the tack that somehow Steve needed to be doing something instead of just advising others to take matters into their own hands. From my point of view, writing the open letter is doing something. He’s not going to go and pull the rug out from under the record labels if he hasn’t already tried to negotiate them into DRM-free tracks. Powerful as iTunes and the iPod are, I think if Steve went to the labels and said, “let us sell DRM-free tracks or we’re done,” then the labels are going to say, “see you later, alligator.” Probably not in those exact words, of course.


8 Comments

Kelmon said:

I quite enjoyed reading the letter and it made a lot of sense with the exception of the part about opening up FairPlay to other companies. If making this technology to multiple stores and manufacturers of MP3 player then how come Windows Media's DRM system still has the backing of the record labels? Surely this is the sort of nightmare scenario that Steve is picturing but, as yet, the record studios haven't taken their toys home from places like Napster and Urge. That part just doesn't jibe with me so I rather think that Steve is making himself look a bit of a fool on this one.

I see no reason why DRM is being used but the argument for not licensing FairPlay just doesn't add up for me.

February 7, 2007 8:53 AM
Dan Moren said:

Lots of people have raised this as a question. I have a couple of theories about it:

1) PlaysForSure, Microsoft's licensed scheme, has nowhere near the market saturation of iTunes. I realize this is kind of like the marketshare argument for OS X security vs. Window security, but I don't think PlaysForSure has the kind of attention on it that FairPlay and Apple have.

2) Given that PlaysForSure also is mainly used for subscription services, I wonder if that somehow impacts the effects of piracy or lack thereof?

3) Notice also that Microsoft has stepped away from PlaysForSure with the Zune Marketplace. They appear to be realizing that open licensing is not necessarily the best option.

4) If Jobs is being truthful about the fact they only have a short amount of time to repair cracks before the record industry can just withdraw their license, then I do have to imagine that they'd be pushing the limits on that if working with multiple vendors. That said, if the RIAA wants them to license it bad enough, I'm sure that clause could be renegotiated.

But this is beside the point, in my estimation. Steve is saying that no DRM is the way to go, and in that I agree with him completely. The record companies need to be convinced of that fact, not dangled the option of licensing FairPlay.

February 7, 2007 9:07 AM
joel said:

I love the photo mock-up for this article. Top notch photoshop skills!

February 7, 2007 9:17 AM
Donn said:

We've all seen people say that they refuse to buy fron iTMS, and continue to buy physical CDs, because of the DRM. It's pretty clear that consumers really want non-DRMed music.

My theory: the RIAA is still hoping that the unpleasantness of DRM will keep people buying CDs and maintain their business model.

"I'm not dead yet!" cries the man in the cart.

February 7, 2007 10:08 AM
Adam said:

I absolutly hate the RIAA and the old foggies that run the record companies.

They built an entire industry around one good song and an album full of crap.

And they get all huffy when we only want the one good song.

I want the old farts to go ahead and die already so technology can move forward.

February 7, 2007 10:20 AM
Jim said:

Great article Dan, it coincides with my response to others' responses exactly.

It's pretty extraordinary for Jobs to put out such a statement--a "virtual Keynote." But it's amazing to me that so many of the other industry players either did not read and understand it, or deliberately ignored the parts they didn't want to hear.

Worst of all is the government official in Norway who cannot get his head around the fact that the owners of digital content are the ones calling the shots on DRM, not Apple. Apple can tinker with DRM or license or whatever, but if the end result is weakened or further-circumvented DRM, the labels will pull their music. How then, is it Apple's primary responsibility to "fix" the issue?

February 7, 2007 10:40 AM
Mark U. said:

Further to the above, John Gruber raises the point in his essay on this topic that even should Apple decide to license FairPlay, it doesn't mean that anyone would buy it. It would depend on how Apple priced the license, whether the potential buyer had a content distribution system (music store) of their own, etc. If that approach failed, what do the industry, governements, etc. do next? Call for Apple to give FairPlay away? The arguments just get progressively sillier.

February 7, 2007 10:53 AM
Kelmon said:

IRT Mark U: You've got to figure that if Apple was to make FairPlay available to other companies, and assuming that they didn't charge something ridiculous to use it, then the question would be "who wouldn't license it?". Given the massive market share of the iPod relative to all others and the record labels' requirement for DRM to be applied to the music sold then you've got to expect that gaining access to the iPod market for your online music store has to be an incredibly attractive proposition to anyone.

IRT Dan: You've got to wonder what terms Microsoft received from the record labels for selling music encrypted with PlaysForSure. It is possible that they got better terms than Apple such that there was a reduced chance of the labels pulling their content from the online stores if PlaysForSure was broken but I have my doubts. If it has worked for PlaysForSure so far then I see no reason why such a model can't work for Apple either. I entirely agree that no DRM is by far and away the best option and that Steve wants to go in this direction but I don't think he's helping his case by dismissing one alternative option that, as an argument, I don't think holds water based on the evidence of such an existing scheme. If proprietary DRM schemes, that only operated from a single online store and on the manufacturer's players, were the only options then Steve's argument would be fine but PlaysForSure seems to bugger it up for him.

February 8, 2007 12:55 AM

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