The Media Column

ROTTEN APPLE?

17-02-2007

The head honcho at Apple computers has been posing as the punter's friend this week, calling for an end to those annoying restrictions that plague buyers of music downloads. Our media commentator Paul Bradshaw says beware of billionaires bearing soundbites.

Steve Jobs could get a job as a politician. The head of Apple this week called for an end to Digital Rights Management (DRM), a technology which restricts how you can use the music you've paid for and that has annoyed music consumers for as long as it has existed.

Modern DRM developed out of the panic that grabbed record companies as peer to peer services like Napster allowed young people to exchange mp3s as freely as they exchanged phone numbers.

A range of companies have created a number of different DRM technologies, but the central theme throughout is control. This can be control over what you can listen to your music on, how many computers you can store it on, and even how many times you can listen to it.

Apple's own ‘FairPlay' DRM, for example, prevents you listening to tracks you've purchased from iTunes on anything but an iPod - unless you burn them to CD (meaning you pay more), rip them back onto your computer, and then transfer to your mp3 player. Can you see your granny managing that?

Those Mac-lovers who sneered at Microsoft's monopolising Internet Explorer bundling tactics may want to note that a court in Norway recently ruled that Apple was acting in a similarly illegal fashion. The FairPlay system, it said, was one “whose main purpose is to lock the consumers to the total package provided by Apple by blocking interoperability”.

So why is Jobs calling for an end to DRM? Perhaps he realises the game is up. Perhaps he genuinely wants to see more people buying music, and less people angry and frustrated. Or perhaps he's a canny politician who's happy to say what people want to hear, without necessarily actually doing anything about it. The spotlight instead shifts to those ‘stubborn' record company executives who cling to DRM like drowning men to a punctured life raft.

Taking the bait, Warner Music chairman Edgar Bronfman Jr this week defended the technology, saying: “As for DRM, intellectual property deserves some measure of protection - I don't agree that it should have no protection from piracy.”

At least Bronfman is not playing to the crowd. As for Jobs, a number of commentators have pointed out that he could do a lot more than publishing 1900 word manifestos. He could license the proprietary FairPlay DRM to other companies, but he won't. He could drop DRM altogether, but he hasn't.

For the past decade Apple has cleverly cast itself as the good-looking hero of the computing industry, against Microsoft's grey clones. Now as it repositions itself as a giant of the new music industry, it's repeating the trick. But don't be fooled: those shiny white iPods may look cool, but they are starting to remind me of Darth Vader's stormtroopers.

Useful links:

Why Steve isn't going to upset the DRM Apple cart

Complaint against iTunes Music Store (PDF)

Apple DRM rant still hasn't moved labels

Warner's fear of lost billions

Wikipedia: DRM