A fascinating open letter by Steve Jobs on DRM
Just over a year ago I wrote a post to a Mac Forum that I meant to post in my blog, but I was worried that I wasn’t totally coherent enough – it was posted in that forum as a sampler to see if I’d thought it through. In retrospect, I should have posted it here.
The gist was that the legally downloadable music market was increasing and that with many players coming into the market that the DRM landscape was bound to fracture and this would only be bad for consumers due to incompatibility between various DRM schemes. I thought that an open standard for DRM would be the way forward. I’m a fan of open standards, and I was pessimistic enough to think that none of the major (i.e. not bleep) players would even consider not using DRM.
Oh ye of little faith: it seems that Steve Jobs would embrace this whole-heartedly.
Mark me surprised, and impressed…. Mind you getting the idiots who own the rights to media to play along is another matter altogether….
On a side-note – I was amused to find while writing this post that the company that I and a few friends used to work for in the waning days of last millennium who tried to sell music on-line before it was fashionable no longer sell music through their own site, but now just link to iTunes.
Edit: John Gruber’s take on the letter
