Steve Jobs advocates canning DRM

Steve Jobs, in a statement posted to the Apple website today, suggests that doing away with DRM altogether is a good option for music lovers and music companies. For the uninitiated, DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, and is the copy protection on MP3s downloaded from iTunes and other "legal" download sites. Movies downloaded from a service like MovieLink.com come with DRM, as well.

Steve mentions "three different alternatives for the future", although one is not different.

1. Keep things the same, where DRM-ized music plays on a "limited number" of iPods and up to five computers.

2. "The second alternative is for Apple to license its FairPlay DRM technology to current and future competitors with the goal of achieving interoperability between different company’s players and music stores. On the surface, this seems like a good idea since it might offer customers increased choice now and in the future. And Apple might benefit by charging a small licensing fee for its FairPlay DRM. However, when we look a bit deeper, problems begin to emerge. The most serious problem is that licensing a DRM involves disclosing some of its secrets to many people in many companies, and history tells us that inevitably these secrets will leak."

3. (Wait for it....) "The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely."

I'll take door No. 3, Monty.

Steve says that if the big four music companies would allow Apple to license their music without DRM, they would do it in a "heartbeat".

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

Links:
NY Times review of Jobs' statement
Jobs actual statement at Apple.com

UPDATE 2/7/07: I now understand why Steve Jobs posted his statement advocating the cancellation of DRM. Record companies are pressuring Apple to license FairPlay. His statement is his way of pushing back against this pressure. Apple has a long history of holding proprietary technology instead of licensing it -- to their detriment. Sony suffers the same malaise, which killed MiniDisc and other great innovations. I think both Apple and the record companies have a lot to learn.

Financial Times:

However, several music executives on Wednesday dismissed his suggestion as disingenuous and reiterated their argument that inter-operability between devices would be improved if Apple were to license its own DRM to other companies rather than doing away with the protections altogether. They also suggested that Mr Jobs’s true motive was to defuse legal problems in Europe, where Apple is being asked to make iTunes compatible with other devices.