Believing Steve Jobs
Yesterday I came across two separate articles raising questions about Steve Jobs’s sincerity in his now famous “Thoughts on Music” essay. John Gruber brings up these questions only in order to refute them, referring to two negative reactions to Jobs’s announcement (by Paul Thurott and Paul Kedrosky) and explaining why the authors are dead wrong. Bill Thompson, on the other hand, is firmly in the skeptics’ camp. He simply doesn’t believe that Jobs means what he says when he calls for eliminating DRM.
This skepticism is rooted in the assumption that Apple will never willingly give up the benefits of the iPod/iTunes lock-in it has achieved thanks to its FairPlay DRM. What these critics seem to have forgotten is that the buzz when the iTunes Store was launched was that Apple, having failed to convince the major labels to forgo DRM, had concocted the least intrusive scheme possible out of necessity:
Jobs has been an outspoken opponent of so-called digital rights management (DRM) in the past, arguing that limitations on digital music will undermine the market for legitimate content.
It was only later, when people began to realize the implications of FairPlay on the dynamics of online music sales, that they decided that Steve Jobs, universally heralded as a business genius, must have seen this coming. (I first encountered this view in an article entitled “Convergence Kills” that was as prescient in this regard as it was dead wrong about Apple’s future entry into the telephone market.)
The reality is that Apple does benefit from DRM-induced lock-in, but this comes at a very high price. First of all, more and more people are finally accepting the obvious fact that DRM vastly reduces the size of the overall market for online content sales (Paul Kedrovsky’s boneheaded attitude notwithstanding). Also, the effect of this lock-in is probably exaggerated for the reason cited by Jobs in his article: the vast majority of tracks are still ripped from CD (or downloaded illegally) and are therefore bereft of DRM. Finally, there is a growing backlash against DRM both among the general public and at the governmental level, most notably the legislative action against Apple in a number of European countries that Jobs also mentions.
Seen in this light, it’s easy to imagine what was going through Jobs’s head. Apple was originally against DRM but was forced into it by the record labels. Now that it is perceived as having engineered the whole situation in order to sew up the market for online music, it is suddenly finding itself the primary target of the anti-DRM crowd. Nothing I’ve ever heard or read about Steve Jobs would make me doubt for a second that he would jump on the opportunity to set the record straight.
It’s true that his reasons for eschewing licensing of FairPlay to other parties are a bit thin, but you can hardly blame him when this is clearly the worst of all scenarios for Apple. The status quo at least affords Apple with a strong barrier to competition, whereas a DRM-free world would let Apple compete on its formidable design and engineering merits while getting a (perhaps slightly smaller) piece of a much, much larger pie. Licensing keeps the pie small but eliminates lock-in, so a little dubious spin is perhaps to be expected. But when Jobs says that he would prefer to see DRM go away entirely, I for one believe him.
4 Comments »
Trackback URL RSS feed for comments on this post.
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
“Seen in this light, it’s easy to imagine what was going through Jobs’s head. Apple was originally against DRM but was forced into it by the record labels. Now that it is perceived as having engineered the whole situation in order to sew up the market for online music, it is suddenly finding itself the primary target of the anti-DRM crowd.”
Wonderful insight! You should e-mail your post to those overzealous prosecuters in Norway.
Comment by Tom Barta — 2/14/2007 @ 8:25 pm
It wouldn’t do any good to give the facts to Norway. These people are ignorant, capitalism-hating socialists who resent corporate success of any kind and will ignore any facts that fail to support their belief that any company that creates value and wealth must have cheated.
Comment by roger — 2/15/2007 @ 12:21 am
Why impose limitations on a real buyer - the one paying for your products? Any pirate worth a pinch of salt would prefer to rip/download a CD at 192 to 320 kbps. An iTS customer is not such a pirate, after all, he’s paying for 128 kbsp in AAC format. Imposing DRM on an iTS customer is illogical.
The same goes for subscription services, where, presumably, the quality is even worse. Where a subscription service streams high quality files, yes, DRM could be useful because customers ripping high-quality files from a subscription service - if any such exist - would make a mockery of the service.
Comment by Blinx — 2/15/2007 @ 10:27 am
Wow, Roger, that’s a bit extreme isn’t it? Why all the hate for Norway?
The wikipedia article about Norway makes them out to be pretty on top of things - they have the “second highest GDP per-capita” in the world, and the “highest position in the World on the UNDP Human Development Index”. Doesn’t sound like a county of “ignorant, capitalism-hating socialists” to me!
peace
Comment by Jos — 2/16/2007 @ 7:41 pm