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Steve Jobs has an attack of common sense

February 6, 2007

You know the problem: you download music, it has “protection” on it.  Move it from one machine to another the wrong way, or lose the wrong hard drive from your backup copies, and BZZT!!! there goes your encryption key.  Sorry, chump.  You had a thousand bucks worth of music, that took you forever to collect.  Now it’s gone.

And it’s all so unnecessary.  The encryption won’t stop piracy; it will only alienate legitimate customers.  Besides, copying and trading has always boosted sales in the long run.  And now Steve Jobs agrees with me.

Huh.  ‘Bout time he came around.  Why don’t these mega-rich super-geniuses ask me in the first place?  I coulda’ told ‘em.  :P

Update:  Here’s Jobs’ actual essay – he does a good ‘job’ of exploring the whole topic from several angles.  An excerpt:

…Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy….

 

Categories: business
  1. zilch
    February 7, 2007 at 04:43 | #1

    Now all Jobs has to do is remove the regional fussiness of the DVD players in his laptops, add a couple buttons to his mouses, and he’ll be on a run.

  2. February 7, 2007 at 09:36 | #2

    Unfortunately Zilch, the region fussiness is not up to him, but it actually is up to the manufacturers of DVD players and DVDs.  But if you want to get around it, look for a program called DVD shrink.  You might have to find it on a P2P downloading program.

    DVD shrink can sometimes break the region codes of DVDs.

    As for Steve Jobs.  It’s about damn time!!!!

  3. christopher
    February 8, 2007 at 00:42 | #3

    because of DRM, I have never even considered downloading from itunes or any other online music file retailer.  legally downloaded mp3s are an inferior product.

  4. zilch
    February 8, 2007 at 02:30 | #4

    Thanks for the tip, webs.  I don’t have the laptop yet, but I read about the problem.  Of course, with a new Intel Mac you could just play the DVD in Windows, no?  I believe there are lots of getarounds for PCs.

  5. February 8, 2007 at 08:52 | #5

    Yes you could play the DVD in Windows, but remember.  If you buy the DVD in America, do to region codes, it will only play on DVDs manufactured for the US.  If you buy a DVD player manufactured for Japan, it will only play DVDs made for Japan.

    So be careful about buying DVDs on Ebay and buying computers from Ebay.  That DVD region BS might get in the way.

    I am sure there are other get-arounds but I haven’t seen to many of them.  But DVD shrink is by far the easiest to use and works about 9 times out of 10.

  6. zilch
    February 8, 2007 at 09:23 | #6

    Too late for us to worry about DVD codes- since we live in Austria, but often buy DVD’s in the States, we’ve got about 50/50 DVD’s from regions 1 and 2.

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