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 Jobs is absolutely right

[NXprime]

Steve Jobs is absolutely right when he says that most music is ripped from CD. I have 1318 songs on my ipod and only 69 of those are from iTunes. So I paid $69 for DRM music? Ehh no. About 40 of em were from those Pepsi 1 free song giveaways the last few years. Also to note, I have paid for 26 TV show episodes & 5 ipod games. My real beef with iTunes isn't the DRM since it doesn't bother me at all. What does bother me is the low bitrate music songs that it offers. I literally pay upwards of $30-$40 per CD for some decent Japanese music that I am absolutely addicted to. Anything less than Apple Lossless would be a crime for the price that I paid for that music. I feel it's excellent quality music so therefore 128 kbs protected ACC encoding seems completely inferior than what I'm used to listening to. That and the fact the Japanese version of iTunes ain't got jack shit on it. :/ Oh and LOL, I am paying $30 per CD like the RIAA wants me to. Stupid Japanese music prices. :(