We touched on Apple's French problem here. It unearthed an old Steve Jobs quote on a Songbird blog (via SiliconBeat)...
In 2002, Steve Jobs said, "If you legally acquire music, you need to have the right to manage it on all other devices that you own."
In 2006, France said, "The consumer must be able to listen to the music they have bought on no matter what platform."
The Jobs quote refers to the ability to be able to play music you burn from a CD to other devices. Regardless, the point is simple and clear: If you own something legally, you should be able to use it on any device that you want -- that is, authentication of ownership ideally should be made at the individual level and not at the device level. Consider Sun's Jonathan Schwartz's take on DRM...
There must be no hard linkage to any one device.
I was with the Chief Executive of a music company recently, who told me how thrilled he was to have a growing percentage of his revenues being derived from digital distribution. But there was one caveat - 95% of the digital distribution came through one vendor's product and service (guess which), the owner of which had let him know his royalty stream was being radically reduced, unilaterally, in a new contract. No negotiation.And therefore, we believe an effective DRM solution must be available to IP owners on all devices - not be hidebound to one.
There must be no hard linkage to any one media format.
Another studio head let me know how adopting Windows Media only allowed him to compete for customers on the Windows platform, which with Vista coming up, was looking like Microsoft's exclusive platform to monetize - he wanted a neutral DRM, and an open encoding standard. He very much wanted a "write once, run anywhere" platform, similar to the web standards popularized by products like Firefox, Java and other network standards. We obviously agree.
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