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.

Some Of Jobs Other 'Stands'

[Anonymous Coward]

Jobs also came out strongly in favor of:

* Ponies for everyone - who doesn't love ponies?

* Rainbows everyday - wouldn't the world be just that much better?

* Love - it doesn't have to be just for dirty hippies

You gotta hand it to Jobs and his bold stance of anti-DRM and pro ponies, love, and rainbows. Let's all go out and buy incremental upgrades to our iPods!

apple

[jjeffries]

>It should not take Apple's iTunes team more than 2-3 days to implement a solution for not wrapping content with FairPlay...

Yes, but that doesn't include the six months needed to design the new icons...

Re:Law of Averages

[walt-sjc]

if you are one of those extremes who's spent $30k on iTunes music, you probably don't care that it locks you into the iPod as your portable player.

Such wealthy people include Apple executives... Hmm.

Re:Missing links?

[k_187]

Why bother when most won't RTFA?

Re:Missing links?

[Joe Snipe]

Hell, I didn't even read the headline!