In a recent open letter, the Apple CEO Steve Jobs called for the Music Industry to relax their stance on DRM. While the record companies may have insisted that DRM be in place before they would license their catalogue to Apple, it was Apple themselves who have placed the greatest restriction on the music bought on iTunes - that you can't play it on any non-Apple devices.
Jobs then went on to claim it would be a bad idea to license their 'Fairplay' technology so the files could be played on other devices, saying:
"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. The Internet has made such leaks far more damaging, since a single leak can be spread worldwide in less than a minute. Such leaks can rapidly result in software programs available as free downloads on the Internet which will disable the DRM protection so that formerly protected songs can be played on unauthorized players. "
Sorry mate, but in case you hadn't noticed, your 'Fairplay' DRM system has already been cracked numerous times, check out http://hymn-project.org/ for starters.
It seems Apple would rather the record labels change their stance on DRM in general, rather than Apple have to license their technology to others. This currently seems unlikely, with the RIAA urging Apple to license their DRM technology to others.
2 comments:
I think you misunderstood Jobs' intention with his discussion of the difficulty of licensing FairPlay to other companies. It's not that it would be easier to crack -- as you said it is crackable today -- but that remedying the situation quickly enough (so that record companies don't pull their libraries from the iTunes store) when that happens would become extremely difficult to coordinate. Let's say that Creative, Sony, and MS licensed FairPlay from Apple. Whenever a crack is released, Apple will have to tell then what has changed and then *they will all have to update their software in unison*. That's much more difficult than it sounds.
I see your point, but Jobs has only started talking about relaxing the DRM since Norway, France & Germany have threatened to take action against Apple. I suspect less effort would be spent on trying to crack the DRM if the files could be used on other non Apple devices.
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