RIAA misreads Jobs' open letter on DRM, thinks he's offering to license FairPlay
By Peter Rojas 
posted February 7th 2007 2:28PM
posted February 7th 2007 2:28PM
Steve Jobs' open letter about DRM and music yesterday definitely got a lot of tongues wagging, but there's one group that might want to re-read what he wrote. Bit Player (you gotta scroll down to the bottom of the post) reports that our old friends at the RIAA issued a response today lauding Apple's offer to license FairPlay as a "welcome breakthrough" that would be a "real victory for fans, artists and labels." There's only one problem: Jobs didn't offer to license FairPlay at all. In fact, he makes it pretty clear that he thinks that switching to an open model for DRM wouldn't work ("Apple has concluded that if it licenses FairPlay to others, it can no longer guarantee to protect the music it licenses from the big four music companies.") and that the best option is to eliminate DRM altogether. We already knew that the majors are totally in denial about this stuff, but to pretend that his letter (however motivated) was anything other than a broadside against DRM is silly.
John Miller,
You are absolutely correct that cars are not songs, and I certainly don't mean anything personal in our spirited debate, my obtuseness aside ;)
Yes, songs can be copied easily and disseminated-- so can books available for free online. "Copy, cut, paste" comes to mind. This is the clearest example I have. As I said, people that want it illegally are going to get it anyway, DRM or no DRM. If someone pruchases a song, they should have 100Z% ownership of it, end of discussion.
As to discovering new bands, so you can discover new music, why not just let people listen online to a band and/or song, and then if they want it they can buy it? Renting it is fine if that's what somneone wants to do, as they have limits on what they are renting just like someone renting a movie. Selling someone a song and then telling them how they can use it (or most likely *not* use it) is the height of insanity.
DRM DOES NOT protect artist's intellectual property. Not even a little bit. As I mentioned, anyone slightly Internet savvy can download anything they want for free and never get caught. The RIAA only catches those less net-savvy-- and that pool of people is shrinking all the time. (They are also the ones most likely to buy a non DRM laced CD anyway).
As with books, songs can be easily replicated and those that want to copy them and get them free already will. Those that buy a song/album are the ones getting screwed because the music companies have an insane business strategy to piss off the customer.
Again:
1. Anyone can get music for free if they want to illegally already despite DRM's existence.
2. People that pay for music legally probably aren't going to just start giving away every song they have to others, if they wanted to do so, they wouldn't pay for it in the first place. They would download for free, and then share for free.
3. Even music not paid for helps spread the word about new bands. And then they are MORE likely to attract paying fans, not less.
4. Musicians that sell direct to consumers is the future. The artist deserves 100% of the proceeds of their art, not the pittance allowed by music companies. In the case where they choose to use an online store, they still get more than they would with a record company.
5. IF DRM is only hurting the people who buy music legally anyway, THEN DRM is no longer relevant and useful and just engenders more and more rage against music companies.
6. Artists (musical and the written word) have said that free distribution of their work has made them MORE money in the long run than copy protecting their work to the nth degree-- the only reason music companies fight this is because they are swiftly becoming the middle man, and know they are being cut out.
DRM is a failure that needs to go the way of the horse and buggy.
DRM rocks. especially when i want to listen to music while i'm on my two month vacation. What's that you say? AH, crap!
I see the RIAA has stocked an army to go out commenting on sites like Engadget today. Don't kid yourselves, guys - my company used to do this too. Almost every big company does. These are paid RIAA shills. Still, I'll bite:
"But the person or company who owns the music should have the right to protect its intellectual property, and that means they should be able to make sure you don't give illegal copies to other people."
There has never - NEVER - in this country been a doctrine of pre-emptive law enforcement. That's true of everything, music or anything else. The obvious reason is that you don't punish law-abiding people. You punish criminals. Punishing law-abiding people just pisses your consumers off. This is not good business. How do some of you not see this? Oh, right, I forgot - the RIAA is paying your bills.
If I go and buy an article of clothing, is there something intrinsic to the pattern of the clothing that's designed specifically to prevent me from taking a sewing machine and duplicating it, then selling it to a friend? No. Even with the threat of piracy (and plenty of fake Gucci bags are confiscated every year), clothing and accessory makers have sought to punish the *criminals* who actually sell the bootleg merchandise, *not* the consumers buying it at the point of sale.
Nobody is arguing that music piracy should be legalized, so stop equating an anti-DRM stance with a pro-piracy stance. It's insulting to our intelligence. Go ahead and prosecute real pirates - you know, the people who are actually out there distributing copied songs. That's what piracy is. Piracy is not having the same song on two PC's in your own house to listen to in two different rooms, and neither is having a copy on a PC, having a copy on an iPod and having a copy in your car.
But don't treat every single consumer like a pirate. That's what DRM does. Not only that, but because of its restrictions and because of bad laws like the DMCA, it *makes* a lot of legitimate consumers into pirates in the eyes of the RIAA simply because they have no choice but to break the DRM in order to exercise their fair use rights. You know, the rights explicitly granted to them under copyright law and further clarified in 20+ years of case law.
Even from a pure business perspective, all DRM has done for the record industry is turned Apple into a virtual monopoly on music players, because it locks consumers in. How has that helped the RIAA? Wouldn't it be better for the RIAA, which is now in a desperate bid to try to dislodge Apple from their perch in order to regain pricing leverage, if MS could sell Zunes that play music purchased from the iTunes Music Store? Then what happens when the Zune gets popular... wouldn't they like it if iPod users could similarly download songs from the Zune store? The only truly workable solution for interoperability is ditching DRM. On the other hand, the only possible outcome of DRM is for one company to control nearly the entire market for downloadable music and players. Even Apple now realizes that this doesn't make any sense.
DRM is dead. Accept it. The RIAA just doesn't know it yet. But they will, or they'll be dead along with it.
Jeff,
I'm not a shill. The RIAA has never been concerned with PR, so why would they start now by employing people to troll a board that's not going to have any effect on the outcome of DRM? Makes no sense.
I'm just hoping that people who are obsessed with having to own all their music don't kill off the subscription services.
Jeff is absolutely right in his comments on DRM. While I argue reasons for why it is foolish and really useless, what it boils down to is the record companies assuming consumers are guilty of piracy before they are, and stopping them.
DRM is such a joke, I am too tired to even type another response. It is the past, and totally useless. You can't try and pre-emptively punish people for something you think they may do with THEIR product after they bought it.
OK, I get it; it's a continuation of the bs Mr. Gates treated us to in his recent interview on M$n. Apple can't secure its OS and Microsoft can. The sheer ridiculousness of that statement boggles the mind. Then again, we're living in a world where those in power are somehow able to convince a sizable number of us to believe things simply because they are oft repeated.
I'm not sure that there is anything digital that can't be hacked, reverse engineered or otherwise compromised. That is the point Steve was making in his essay. Why he decided to express himself publicly is anyone's guess, jab at RIAA? My only question to Mr. Jobs, a sitting member of Disney's board, is how about Disney and ABC going first in releasing DRM free content? The proof is in the pudding, so to speak.
One of the biggest problems with most things digital is that you never really own anything, except maybe the hardware(still, even the purposes for which you use the hardware are regulated); you license use. One either agrees to the terms, or you don't get to use it at all. This hardly constitutes an agreement; which, to my mind, involves two parties reaching a decision together, not one side being put over a barrel. The bottom line to me, is simply that the new business paradigm is for items never to be purchased. By controlling the licensing, being able to say things like, "this product is not guaranteed for any fitness, etc., etc." companies are able to go beyond reasonable indemnification and can move to controlling every aspect of a customer's 'use' of its products. Thus weakening and eventually eliminating the notion of 'fair use'.
I never said that PlaysForSure is unbreakable. I said Microsoft wants its DRM as unbreakable as possible. I cited the same hack as you (I didn't remember the name of the hack but I remember that Microsoft released a critical patch within two days).
The point is that DRM means Microsoft can make more money off content therefore Microsoft invests more to make it as unbreakable as possible. No DRM means Apple can make more money off hardware so Apple puts the least amount of effort into it.
It's not a surprise that Microsoft has the better DRM and can license it but Apple has weak DRM and will be hacked to smithereens if it's licensed.
I'd just like to point out to all the people who claim that Apple likes DRM because it "locks people into the iPod" that Jobs addressed this in his essay.
He wrote:
Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats. It’s hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future. And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music.
@Jesse:
Jobbs does indeed "address" the locking-in issue- but did you notice he poses one question and then answers another?
The previous paragraph begins "Some have argued that once a consumer purchases a body of music from one of the proprietary music stores, they are forever locked into only using music players from that one company.". He then replies by claiming that the low average number of songs means for most people this isn't true. So, instead of explaining how purchasing a "body of music" isn't a problem, he's explaining that most people don't have one, so it's not a problem! Or, in other words, those who DO have a substantial "body of music" ARE locked in.
I can't believe this. I must have fallen and hit my head.
First Jobs turns on DRM, blames the people who keep Apple going (the music companies, without who the iPod would flop). Next the RIAA misread an entire paragraph and fail to understand the entire message.
This is too funny to be true.
I haven't heard any good music that I would download in like 5 or 6 years. So DRM or no DRM. Doesn't matter to me.
The Recording Industry Association of America, what jokers, I mean, the making companies think that we are against the wishes of our consumers prank.
Oh, wait...they were serious about that one.
I think you guys are missing the point. You really think the RIAA can't read? I think they are interpreting his letter (as they should) as a direct attack on their organization and everything they stand for. He's asking them to abandon the tactic they've chosen to protect their franchise, and so, in return, they're ignoring some of the details of his letter and asking him to do the same. Essentially, they are saying "listen buddy, you want us to give up our business model - why don't you show us the way."
I think it's actually a pretty clever turning of the tables.
"Steve's attempt to seem like the good guy is only a PR move."
Nail on the head there. Well done, sir.
Jobs has NO, I repeat, NO interest in DRM going away. Why? Because if DRM is gone, the ipod platform/system is open to competition. Steve does not want that.
Steve is not for choice. He is for making money. There's nothing wrong with that. Let's just not make him some savior of the plebians when that just isn't so, K?
There are a lot of people here talking about which they know nothing.
The iPod came a good while before the iTunes music store. I believe it was even made for windows before the music store. I also believe it was already the most popular PMP before the music store was opened.
It's also strange that iTunes music store was the first one that the RIAA licensed their catalogs to. Why didn't they insist on the same DRM for future stores?
The iPod will not be dethroned if the fairplay DRM is removed. I don't think too many people are buying iPods only because of the store.
To the posters who think Apple should have no problem licensing it out to everyone else and who claim Jobs is admitting it's too weak to enforce - you misread the letter. Licensing it out to everyone else is what will weaken it. Just look at how easy it is to get a copy of windows... Too many people have their hands in it. Look at how great plays4sure is. How many times has microsoft had to patch it?
Whose responsibility would it be to make sure that Fairplay updates get written for all the devices that want to use it? Apple? Probably not. So how reliable and how secure would it be if Apple had to tell everyone how it works so they can code it for their player? What are the chances that it will be done correctly for every player? How buggy would the whole system be? How secure would it really be? Again, just take a historical look at windows.
Someone else brought up the good point about Microsoft wanting to own the DRM. Check this out:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
It's a bit technical, but here is one of the best parts:
Vista includes various requirements for “robustness” in which the content industry, through “hardware robustness rules”, dictates design requirements to hardware manufacturers. The level of control the content producers have over technical design details is nothing short of amazing. As security researcher Ed Felten quoted from Microsoft documents on his freedom-to-tinker web site about a year ago:
“The evidence [of security] must be presented to Hollywood and other content owners, and they must agree that it provides the required level of security. Written proof from at least three of the major Hollywood studios is required”.
So if you design a new security system, you can't get it supported in Windows Vista until well-known computer security experts like MGM, 20th Century-Fox, and Disney give you the go-ahead (this gives a whole new meaning to the term “Mickey-Mouse security”). It's absolutely astonishing to find paragraphs like this in what are supposed to be Windows technical documents, since it gives Hollywood studios veto rights over Windows security mechanisms.
And some people complain about Apple...
They read the signal correctly. We interpret their message wrong.
Allow me to translate: RIAA response = forget DRM-Free pipe dream
It's amazing how such a dysfunctional body (backward thinking) still monopolizes one of the most creative industry. I sincerely hope technology will soon render RIAA irrelevant.
DRMs are really just "Digital Restrictions Management" and I stopped counting the number of times DRMs generated problems and hassles for me for something I actually bought, the latest being a recurring offender: Zinio and from witch I will never buy a magazine again - screw them. Anybody who's glad to buy content with an electronic straitjacket is a fucking idiot.
Do like I do and refuse to buy anything with a DRM attached to it, unless it's obvious and sure you can suck it to them (i.e. DVD and CD ripping). I'll be glad they go under with their stupid business model, somebody else will come up to the plate and get my business.
As for the RIAA, they're just an industry mouthpiece staffed by money grubbing lawyers that didn't want to work for the Mafia. They have about the same amount of decency and morals as their illustrious colleagues nonetheless.
Agreed 100%. The RIAA sucks a huge amount.
"Apple has concluded that if it licenses FairPlay to others, it can no longer guarantee to protect the music it licenses from the big four music companies."
I wish we could keep the big four music companies away from our music too.
hey folks - I don't like the RIAA as much as the next guy, but I think it is a little irresponsible of Engadget to claim they 'misread' Jobs' letter.
The whole interweb is aflutter with the 'misread' claim and it seems totally wrong to me. This whole thing is about public posturing and Jobs' letter basically said - 'We could open up fairplay but it wouldn't do any good'. I think the RIAA is just calling his bluff - which is exactly what each of you would do if you were in their position (what else CAN they do???)
I am awaiting the death of DRM like everyone else, but this is going to be a battle and as much as we don't like it - the RIAA is going to fight back. Strategically I think it is a brilliant move on their part and a far cry from misreading the comments of Jobs.
FairBagels
Let’s imagine a catering company called Apple Catering. Apple Catering is a division of Apple Breakroom Supplies, which sells coffee makers, soda machines, and other stuff used in breakrooms at offices. Apple also makes the iPlate, the world most popular portable food-carrying device.
Apple realizes that there is money to be made selling bagels in these breakrooms. Office workers would gladly pay $0.99 for the convenience of buying a bagel right at the office – much easier than going down to the bakery for a whole box of bagels. The only hitch is that it would need to work on the honor system – office workers could take a bagel, and would be asked to drop the $0.99 in a jar.
Apple Catering approaches the “big four” bakers. The bakers agree that it’s a good market, but are worried that people won’t put the money in the jar. They ask Apple Catering to put padlocks on the bagels.
Apple Catering tells the bakers that it is impossible to stop all bagel theft, but they will make the best padlocks that they can.
Continued at:
http://jimonwebgames.com/articles/2007/02/08/fairbagels
It's clear that all the RIAA sees when they read Jobs' letter is dollar signs.
Hey, Abdul... Did you know that the RIAA and MPAA offices are vital cogs in the functioning of the American economy? Say, I have an idea!
Sorry. There's got to be a better way, right? Hope so. I would never condone such a course of action, and I apologize for any racist connotations, but it would probably get a mixed reaction if it happened, no? Especially if the people who worked there got tipped off and evacuated...
People are always saying they hate Bush. That makes no sense. Are the names of the top honchos of the MAFIAA available to the public? Let's hate them instead. Bush will have to move on anyway. Can we elect those other guys? If not, it's a dangerous situation. And the RIAA's response? "Let them eat cake."
I think musicians should just submit their music to Apple and other downloading services and bypass the record companies altogether. Stick it to RIAA once and for all.