WHY IS THIS MAN SMILING?
How Steve Jobs' ideas on digital rights management could benefit consumers -- and Steve Jobs
First, Amazon.com Chief Jeff Bezos announced that he wants his own space fleet, and will build his own intergalactic bus depot in West Texas.
Then, in a Newsweek interview published during the launch of Windows Vista, Bill Gates found himself powerless to stop babbling that Windows was way more stable and secure than the Mac OS and that Apple stole most of its coolest features from Microsoft, provoking a flood of concern from compassionate users all across the globe.
And just last week, Steve Jobs topped both of them by insisting that digital rights management -- the system that prevents people from making infinite copies of their online music purchases -- was unnecessary, ineffective and anti-consumer, and urged the music industry to abandon it completely.
Steve's open letter to the industry ("Thoughts on Music," linked right from Apple.com's top page) is certainly the least-expected of the three. All the same, it shows the most sense.
Apple's proprietary FairPlay DRM system and others were essential in kick-starting the sale of online music, but they've served their purpose. FairPlay prevents people from stealing music from the iTunes Store, true, but it also prevents the folks who purchased music and video legitimately from playing their legally obtained content on anything other than Apple-branded software or hardware.
And the people who are going to steal are simply going to steal it from other online sources, which were already crammed with illegal MP3s long before the Store came along.
Piracy is unstoppable. This sad fact of life shouldn't be used as a license to degrade the experience for the typical honest consumer.
Besides, in his letter, Steve says the iTunes Store has sold only 22 DRMed tracks for each iPod sold. So clearly, the consumers who pay for music are sensible enough to want it without DRM: They're buying it on CD, and ripping the tracks into the unlocked format of their choice.
The music industry really ought to go for this. Unlocked music downloads represent the only big stick they can possibly use against Apple's titanic industry dominance.
For instance, music industry execs desperately want to charge double for new, hot tracks, but Apple refuses to budge from its 99-cent flat pricing scheme. If the music execs offered their tracks to one of the iTunes Store's competitors without DRM, they could dictate their own terms, while still selling content that works on those 90-million-plus iPods.
But look, Steve Jobs is no philosopher-king, routinely holding public salons on the intriguing intellectual issues of the day, and his "Thoughts on Music" has spawned intense public speculation about his motives.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation praises Jobs for taking such a clear public stand on the issue. But they (quite correctly) wonder why, if he's all gung-ho against DRM, Jobs doesn't allow independent labels that are already selling music on the iTunes Store to sell their wares unlocked and unprotected.
The Recording Industry Association of America, bless 'em, are once again demonstrating that they have the same grip on reality that a trout has on a tennis racquet. Its chief praised Jobs and "agreed" with him that yes indeed, FairPlay DRM needs to spread to all levels of the consumer music experience (Steve only cited that possibility to illustrate how impractical the idea was).
And some analysts speculate that this is all simply to put some additional pressure on the music publishers as Apple prepares to renew its music agreements.
I'm inclined to take Steve's letter at partial face value. Unlocked music and video files create the best possible user experience, and making things easy for users has always been the key to Apple's success.
But it's naive to think that he solely has his users' interests in mind. A world without DRM won't hurt the iPod or make it less competitive.
As Apple CEO, Jobs can control the future of the iPod. But if the music industry allows him to drop DRM from the iTunes Store, he no longer has to worry about pesky European fair-trade laws that insist that iTunes purchases be playable on non-Apple devices. And if "open and unlocked" becomes the new black, it discourages the iTunes Store's competitors from selling music, movies, TV shows and even eBooks in proprietary formats that devices like the iPod and Apple's upcoming AppleTV set-top box can't handle.
Most critically of all: A world without DRM also allows Apple to sell content that works on every digital device on the planet -- such as the 75 percent of portable players that don't currently sport an Apple logo, cell phones, TiVOs, even cable boxes.Jeff Bezos, future spaceman, made his billions by making Amazon.com into ... well, the Amazon.com of online retailing.
Steve's ultimate goal is to make the iTunes Store into the Amazon.com of digital media downloads. Kneecapping DRM is an important means towards that end.
It's just one of those rare occurrences in which a powerful corporation's selfish interests and the users' are completely in sync.
Andy Ihnatko writes on technical and computer issues for the Sun-Times.