Steve Jobs Finally Stands Up Against DRM. Sort of

It only took Steve Jobs four years, but in a lengthy post on Apple's website, he has finally come out and said that DRM, the encryption found on all the music his iTunes Store sells to keep it from being copied, is bad.

Well, sort of. Jobs' open letter to the music industry (and, I guess, everyone else) is 1,877 words of patting himself on the back, carefully worded caveats to avoid offending music labels, and, finally, a hesitant call for abandonment of DRM in music. Well, good for you, Mr. Jobs! It's about time.

The case against DRM gets more obvious every day. Jobs points out that barely two percent of music found on iPods is purchased from the iTunes Store. That means nearly 98 percent of music files are obtained from ripped CDs or pirated from the Internet. Music labels are paid for the former but receive nothing for the latter... but the shift toward online distribution is on, legal or not. It's in the labels' best interests to get a cut of those fees.

The technical problems with DRM are what Jobs spends most of his post discussing. It's not that DRM is too difficult for people to get around, but rather that it just doesn't do any good. Most music (sold via CD) has no DRM on it, and it's costly to produce and ship. And yet DRM is enough of a headache in digital music that it keeps millions of people from buying music online. DRM is the only thing that keeps me from shopping at the iTunes Store very much. I've bought less than 10 songs in my life from iTunes because burning a CD and ripping it back to my PC is just too much of a headache vs. one-click buying at Amazon or picking up a used CD.

One thing Jobs doesn't mention is how the RIAA is destroying goodwill for the music industry by suing its customers. (In fact, he doesn't mention the RIAA at all.) Maybe that's just too obvious to state, but it's another big reason, in my opinion, why music sales are on the decline. Consumers just don't want to support the industry's litigious ways. I have a hunch that, given legal alternatives, so-called pirates would happily pay a buck for a file that had no restrictions on how it could be used.

Excellent rant, Steve! Hope it does some good. Music industry executives aren't known for their patience and ability to read that much verbiage, but hopefully they have lackeys that can digest it for them. Maybe you could put it into one of your fancy presentations?