Going Gruber
Á la the man behind Daring Fireball, who has turned the practice of criticism of tech journalism into an art, this Saturday’s TechMan column in the Post-Gazette inspired me to dash off the following letter:
Mr. Kurtz -
This paragraph in your latest column is, if not just plain wrong, then at least a mean-spirited swipe at Apple that misrepresents the facts:
“Amazon’s MP3s can be played on an iPod or any other type of player. Although Steve Jobs says he wants to sell DRM-free music, he apparently doesn’t want to sell music you can play on a player you didn’t buy from Apple.”
I think that iTunes Plus, which was announced with the EMI (not BMI, as you state earlier in the column), is a pretty fair indication that Apple wants to, and is in fact, selling DRM-free music. You say so yourself.
Are you confusing DRM with AAC, the audio format of the songs sold through iTunes? If so, it is most definitely supported on many other devices, as this list indicates.
Of course, for the music from labels other than EMI, the DRM that is present in the AAC files – FairPlay – is indeed a limitation to playing the music on other devices. However, this is a problem that stems from the record companies, not Apple itself.
Apple’s (not Jobs’, as you state) decision to keep FairPlay to themselves stems from the legal rights of the record companies as it was negotiated in their contract. In Jobs’ “Thoughts on Music,” which you reference, he says:
“However, a key provision of our agreements with the music companies is that if our DRM system is compromised and their music becomes playable on unauthorized devices, we have only a small number of weeks to fix the problem or they can withdraw their entire music catalog from our iTunes store.”
Fixing FairPlay when it is solely under Apple’s control is one thing. Licensing it and fixing any problems that might arise when it is a technology shared by many others is a much harder task. Again, Jobs:
“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. Perhaps this same conclusion contributed to Microsoft’s recent decision to switch their emphasis from an ‘open’ model of licensing their DRM to others to a 'closed’ model of offering a proprietary music store, proprietary jukebox software and proprietary players.”
And as I was re-reading your column, this sentence jumped out as strange to me as well:
“If you downloaded a 'DRM-ed’ song to your computer and wanted to burn it to CD to play in your car, you could not.”
With what music service? Certainly not iTunes, although from the tone of the rest of your column, it seems that is what is implied. I have never had a problem burning a purchased album to a CD. And, as an added bonus, you can even re-rip the songs into MP3 format, if you so wish.
All said, it’s a complex issue, but one that I think is worth additional scrutiny and is deserving of an accurate representation of the facts. I hope you agree.
Thanks for your time,
Jake Krohn
Pittsburgh
