The Economist, DVD Jon On Apple's DRM Stand

We have two followups this morning to Tuesday's story on Steve Jobs's call to do away with DRM for music. The first is an editorial in The Economist sent in by reader redelm, who notes that as "arguably the world's leading business newspaper/magazine" that publication is in a position to influence legal and political decision-makers who may never have heard of DRM. The Economist says: "Mr Jobs's argument, in short, is transparently self-serving. It also happens to be right." Next, Whiney Mac Fanboy sends pointers to two blog entries by "DVD Jon" Johansen. In the first Johansen questions Jobs's misuse of statistics in attempting to prove that consumers aren't tied to iPods through ITMS: "Many iPod owners have never bought anything from the iTunes Store. Some have bought hundreds of songs. Some have bought thousands. At the 2004 Macworld Expo, Steve revealed that one customer had bought $29,500 worth of music." Johansen's second post questions Jobs's "DRM-free in a heartbeat" claim: "There are... many Indie artists who would love to sell DRM-free music on iTunes, but Apple will not allow them... It should not take Apple's iTunes team more than 2-3 days to implement a solution for not wrapping content with FairPlay when the content owner does not mandate DRM. This could be done in a completely transparent way and would not be confusing to the users."
Update: 02/08 16:28 GMT by KD : Added missing links.

Comments

Steve's a salesman

[suv4x4]

You know the salesmen that ring on your doorbell to sell you the latest in water-filtered dust hoovers, or the TN infomercials selling you those ultrasharp, lifetime guarantee knife set?

Steve's no different, except he's a very rich, and smarter salesman. He believes that if you mix: "cool" + "easy" + "hype", he has the sale secured. He won't mind bending some facts to tell you his story, and of all facts, by far the easiest to bend are the statistics, of course. A baby can do it, as he'd say.

I would comment when the original articles was posted, the problem is, this is far too transparent for most people his essay is directed to.

Not that I really believe Steve Jobs will care to read this post or even less take advice from a random commenter, but: Steve, keep the salesman tactics for your next product pitch to the consumers. When you talk to serious people, you better have serious arguments.

Re:All-or-Nothing

[nettdata]

Huh?

I didn't say that they couldn't... but that maybe they haven't developed it yet...

Just because they can, doesn't mean that it was worth the ROI for them to do so. Or that they have other priorities right now, like making things work with Vista.

It could very well be a business decision to not support it.

It could also be that there's no money to be made by doing so.