Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Steve Jobs' letter against DRM


For all of you that have not clue of what DRM means, let me say that DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. In other words, it's the piece of software that controls the way you share your music, videos, pictures, etc.

For example, if you are a user of iTunes and buy music from the internet store, DRM will set that the maximum number of times that you can copy the music to a CD is 6 and that you can share the music with other 4 computers.

There is a lot of movements in Internet against DRM with the argument that controls your freedom as user to do what you want to do. Seriously, DRM is not Steve's idea or Gates' idea. DRM is an initiative that music companies have put in place.

Recently there has been a lot of talk about it because a) iTunes has been declared ilegal (due to DRM) in Norway, and probably the rest of Europe can follow the idea (same to Vista DRM, ...); b) the implementation of DRM from Vista is really strict.

Steve Jobs has react with this letter showing some interesting points:

1) DRM is not his idea
2) He would support any movement to freeDRM music but the industry doesn't let him
...

I found it really interesting. In other words, SJ is trying to push the users to fight the battle against the music companies, cleaning iPod+iTunes name at the same time :-) Really smart.

Here you have a link with more details.

No comments: