Jobs wins at DRM

Almost exactly eleven months ago Steve Jobs published an open letter to the music industry entitled Thoughts on Music.

In it he pointed out what every good tech person knows: if someone gives you an encoded message and also gives you a technical means to decode it — no matter how temporarily or fleetingly — then it's totally impossible to prevent you from decoding it permanently. The most they can do is to make it take a while to figure out how and then when you have succeeded replace it with something else, in a classical arms race.

He also said Apple would put DRM-free music in the iTunes store "in a heartbeat", if the labels would allow them to.

The reaction was sad, if predictable.

The RIAA managed to (deliberately?) misread the letter as an offer to license FairPlay. The labels said Jobs was naive and impractical. Various freetards claimed that Jobs and Apple were the biggest beneficiaries of DRM and were not serious (viz the iPod bondage image).

So here we are eleven months later and it is today reported that Sony BMG Plans to Drop DRM, the last of the four major labels to do so.

A lot of news stories are spinning this as some kind of loss for Jobs and Apple — pretty much because that's what several of the labels are saying, as they take their shiny new DRM-free ball away from the iTunes store and play with their new friends Amazon and others.

I don't know why they think Apple cares.

Apple makes all its money from selling iPods, not from selling music. They opened the iTunes store essentially because they weren't going to sell many iPods if the only music available for purchase online used Microsoft's proprietary Windows Media DRM and was for sale in stores that used Windows-only software. And they developed FairPlay DRM because the music labels weren't going to let them sell DRM-free files.

If the music is available in standard unprotected MP3 (or AAC) then it will work perfectly well on iPods, no matter where people buy the music. The Amazon MP3 store works perfectly well in Safari on a Mac. In fact it's quite nice.

Apple's hardware customers are catered to. Apple will continue to sell boatloads of iPods.

Jobs wins.