Steve Jobs has recently posted an article on the Hot News section of Apple website expressing his thoughts on music, or rather his explanation of the cause and effect of Apple’s Digital Rights Management (DRM) system. Considered its “not so fair” FairPlay DRM recently declared illegal in Norway, with many more legal bills to come from all over Europe including France, Germany, Sweden and Finland; these are not just Jobs’ random thoughts.
Jobs indeed blames the “big four” labels for the DRM system’s existence, saying if they can be convinced to release their music DRM-free, Apple will embrace it wholeheartedly. He advises “those unhappy with the current situation”, i.e. European consumer agencies and/or Apple’s competitors, “should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free”.
On the other side, Jon Johansen, the first and only man to date who managed to unblock FairPlay, accused Apple of lying by quoting an article on NYTimes about Apple rejecting requests from music label to remove FairPlay copy protection from their tracks on Apple Music Store. He also pointed out that Apple was using misleading statistics by showing the 22 songs average per iPod. Jon also demonstrated Microsoft’s case as an example of opening its DRMs to other companies and still had less security breaches than FairPlay
