Apple's Jobs calls for end to music DRM

Apple CEO Steve Jobs posted an essay on the company's website Tuesday calling for the record industry to allow online music sales free of digital rights management safeguards. In an appeal titled "Thoughts on Music," Jobs writes that the vast majority of music downloaded to portable devices like Apple's iPod still originates directly from CDs manufactured without copy-protection mechanisms, and that attaching DRM restrictions to digital content has only limited the market's growth. While Jobs maintains that "customers are being well served" by the music industry's current approach to DRM, with its multiplicity of incompatible anti-piracy systems, he concludes that eliminating such restrictions is "clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat."

The Jobs essay appears two weeks after Norway's consumer ombudsman ruled Apple's iTunes online music storefront illegal because it restricts downloaded content from playback on rival devices, a move applauded by consumer rights organizations across western Europe. In his essay, Jobs dismissed the possibility of licensing Apple's proprietary DRM system FairPlay to competitors, which would enable competing devices like Microsoft's fledgling Zune to play content optimized for the iPod and vice-versa. According to Jobs, that alternative would only complicate DRM enforcement by forcing device manufacturers to coordinate software and hardware updates.

While rival conglomerates Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment officially declined comment, EMI Music representative Jeanne Meyer told The New York Times "The lack of interoperability between a proliferating range of digital platforms and devices is increasingly becoming a real issue for music consumers." A senior executive who requested anonymity told the paper that labels might experiment with new copy-protection systems, but "we're not going to broadly license our content for unprotected digital distribution."

While I voiced my own frustrations with Apple's interoperability restrictions not too long ago, I question the timing and the motives behind "Thoughts on Music" even if I agree with its basic sentiments. Given that European legislators appear united in their opposition to Apple's current digital restrictions, the essay reads like little more than spin, as if Jobs, faced with a battle he knows he won't win, now wishes to portray the company as a champion of consumer freedoms at the forefront of the anti-DRM crusade. Solving this conundrum is going to require Herculean effort by content owners, platform developers and device makers alike--by disqualifying calls to license FairPlay at the very outset of that effort, Jobs still looks more like part of the problem than part of the solution.

For more on the Jobs essay:
- read "Thoughts on Music"

For more on the music industry response:
- read this New York Times article