February 23, 2007
'Steve Jobs' iTunes Dance' Cory Doctorow, in a Salon article, calls BS on Steve Jobs' Anti-DRM Letter: Steve Jobs' iTunes Dance. He says, "I doubt Jobs' sincerity. I suspect he likes DRM because it creates an anti-competitive lock-in to Apple...Although Apple's DRM is wholly ineffective at preventing copying, it does manage to raise the cost of switching from an iPod to a competing device. Every iTunes song you buy for 99 cents amounts to a 99 cent tax on switching from an iPod to a Zune. That's because your iTunes songs won't play on your Zune -- or on any other player, save those made or licensed by Apple. Jobs tries to skate around this in his memo, suggesting that only a tiny fraction of the music on iPods comes from his music store, and so the anti-switching effects are minimal."