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The Technology Liberation Front

The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
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Jobs Blasts DRM

Started by TLF · 3 months ago

4 comments

  • David McElroy

    1 year ago

    Just from watching Jobs for years, this sounds like something he'd say and mean sincerely. I always got the impression that he embraced DRM simply because it was the only way the labels would do deals. He's not the sort of person to have thought DRM was a bad idea and then decide it WAS a good idea and change again now. It seems much more reasonable to assume that he always preferred non-DRM as a business model, but it wasn't an option for him.

    As for why he's pushing the issue now, it seems likely that he's trying to set the agenda for the coming debate with the music industry. Apple's DRM problems in Europe are probably forcing him in that direction sooner than he otherwise would, but it would have happened in time anyway. The advantage to going ahead and publicly discussing it this way is that it puts more pressure onto the labels to consider the non-DRM option. The natural evolution of what's going on in Europe would be for DRM to be decreed to be interoperable. I think he's going public in an effort to bypass that option and go straight to unprotected sales.
  • eee_eff

    1 year ago

    I'm honestly not sure why he chose to speak out now. One possibility is that the rumors that iTunes Store sales are stagnating are true, and Jobs believes that DRM is the culprit. This statement ratchets up the pressure for the labels to accelerate their long-rumored abandonment of DRM.

    The site www.allofmp3.com has provided a very important service to the content industry, showing that if prices are lowered, purchases will increase, in a highly elastic manner. So allofmp3.com has done important market research. But this is something that Jobs knew intuitively.

    Recall that movie houses did very well during the 1930's.

    Using those two pieces of information, the content industry may be able to weather the coming downturn.
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    1 year ago

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    1 year ago

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