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

Re:All-or-Nothing

[nettdata]

Maybe it's just that they don't have the technical infrastructure to support non-DRM'd sales?

It's not like it's stopping Nettwerk from selling their stuff on iTunes... a quick search for obscure stuff like Download and popular stuff like Sarah McLachlan shows that they're available.

"arguably the world's leading business newspaper"

[Flying pig]

Very arguably indeed. The Economist has hijacked its title - it exists purely to promote a particular free market economics, and therefore you cannot expect any kind of reasoned debate on its pages. It's about as independent and academically respectable as the "Cato Foundation". It's likely that, taking the world as a whole, the majority of economists do not accept the baseline belief of "The Economist".

Re:All-or-Nothing

[sdo1]

>I just burn a CD-RW as an audio CD of purchased music and re-import as MP3.

So you take a lousy quality 128 kbps file, convert it to .wav (which is what burning it), then re-encode it again in .mp3 (probably with the lousy encoder built into itunes). I take it sound quality is pretty low on your priority list, huh?

-S