Steve Jobs' iTunes dance

Now the Apple CEO says he would gladly sell songs without digital restrictions, if the record companies let him. That's hardly a brave defiance, and besides, I don't believe him.

Editor's note: This story has been changed since it was first published.

By Cory Doctorow

Read more: Technology & Business, Apple, Steve Jobs, ipod, Cory Doctorow

Feb. 23, 2007 | In early February, Apple CEO Steve Jobs published an extraordinary memo about the music industry, iTunes and DRM (digital rights management), the technology used to lock iTunes Store music to Apple's iPod and iTunes Player. In the memo, Jobs said that "DRMs haven't worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy," and offered to embrace a DRM-free music-sales environment "in a heartbeat," if only the big four music companies would let him.

I doubt Jobs' sincerity. I suspect he likes DRM because it creates an anti-competitive lock-in to Apple. I think he's trying to shift blame for the much-criticized DRM to the music industry, whose executives are twirling their mustaches and declaring DRM to be the only way forward for their industry.

The context for this is complex and global.

DRM technology is used to lock music -- and movies, books and video games -- to a specific vendor's products. It's intended to ensure that copyright holders earn royalties from their music or movies, control how they are distributed, and prevent them from being copied without permission.

Yet the dream of a copy-proof song or movie is a logical absurdity. DRM systems -- built over a span of years at a cost of millions -- are routinely cracked in an afternoon by bored teenagers. BigChampagne, the P2P (peer-to-peer) monitoring service, reports that it takes a mere 180 seconds for a DRM'ed song released on the iTunes Store to show up as a free P2P download. Anyone who thinks that companies are going to make bits get harder to copy in the future is either not paying attention or kidding himself.

DRM's principal effect is legal, not technical. Since the passage of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it's been illegal to break DRMs in this country. It doesn't matter if DRM restricts access to something you have every right to use (for example, a DRM that region-locks a movie you've bought so that it won't play in the U.S.). You're not allowed to break DRM, and corporations certainly can't field products that break it. The results are ugly: Companies like 321 Studios (whose DVD X-Copy software lets you make otherwise legal backups of your DVDs) were sued into oblivion by the motion picture companies for trying such a thing.

So if you shellac a one-atom-thick layer of DRM over a product, you get the full power of the American legal system as a weapon to use against competitors. Apple may have created a successful "Switch" campaign by reverse-engineering Microsoft products like PowerPoint to make Keynote, an Apple program that lets you run old PowerPoint decks on your Mac, but Microsoft can't create a "Switch to the Zune" campaign that offers you the ability to play your iTunes Store songs on a Zune, Microsoft's latest abortive iPod-killer.

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.

While it's true that most of us haven't loaded our 10,000-song iPods with $9,900 worth of iTunes songs, it doesn't follow that the switching cost for even casual iTunes customers is negligible. If you'd bought just one iTunes track every month since the launch in 2003, you'd have rung up $82 in lock-in music. Throw in a couple of $9.99 albums and maybe an audiobook or two and you can easily find yourself in $150 down the lock-in hole.

That's $150 you kiss goodbye if you buy a sexy little Creative Labs Zen or a weird little no-name from the wildly imaginative entrepreneurs of Malaysia. Not only won't your iTunes Store music play on those devices, it's illegal to try to get it to play on those devices.

Jobs is right. If you had 10 grand worth of proprietary music on your iPod, his company's iTunes would be anti-competitive. But that's not to say that $150 worth of lock-in (enough to double the cost of many portable players) isn't a powerful disincentive against switching from the iPod. I'm a lifelong Apple fan boy -- I have an actual Mac tattoo -- but even I remember the dark time of the Performa, when Apple's hardware trailed so far behind the market leaders that buying it was like wearing a hair shirt. I think that it's reasonable to assume that Apple won't always make the world's best music player. I'd like to keep my options open. But the longer you own an iPod, the more likely it is you'll buy more iTunes music, and the fewer options you'll have.

Next page: The iPod is a roach motel: Songs check in, but they don't check out