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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.
Update: 02/08 16:28 GMT by KD : Added missing links.
The Economist on removing DRMc fm?story_id=8660389
http://www.economist.com/daily/news/displaystory.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
He knows what average means. His point is that using an average is misleading, because of the extremes.
He knows what average means, he's just saying that average is not the right figure. The distribution is very important. A 22-song average would imply at first glance that only 1-2% of people are locked in, but if the distribution was a third the listeners with 66 songs and two thirds with none, then it would follow that a third are rather locked in (they take a $60 hit by going elsewhere for their DAP needs)
Also, DVD Jon was pointing out that Jobs's iPod figure reflected all iPods sold, not all that are functional or in use (a number that no one knows). People have been replacing iPods as they break, and have been upgrading as new ones get released. Additionally, music might be on more than one iPod, as a family might authorize everyone's computers to play everyone else's music, so that Bro and Sis can share songs on their iPods.
He knows what average means, and he knows that Steve was specifically referring to the arithmetic mean, because 20 billion songs/ 90 million ipods is the ~22 songs/ipod in question.
He's just saying that using this figure is misleading. Like talking about average fuel economy by dividing all the car miles ever by total gasoline production for the last 110 years. Sure it's the average, but it doesn't really tell you anything about current mileage. Most of those cars are scrap by now, just like many of the ipods sold in the last few years.
I am not a crackpot.
I applaud Jon for his words. TheRegister.com also ran a story about the Norwegian official complaining RE: Steve Job's "passing the buck" style attitude. It can be found here.