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Steve Jobs’ anti-digital rights management screed from earlier this week has elicited a response from the Recording Industry Association of America, who, having already shown off their lousy math skills, are now putting their not-so-great reading comprehension on display:
Apple’s offer to license [the Apple DRM] Fairplay to other technology companies is a welcome breakthrough and would be a real victory for fans, artists and labels. There have been many services seeking a license to the Apple DRM. This would enable the interoperability that we have been urging for a very long time.
Perhaps the RIAA’s Web-enabled computers, still crippled by the last remnants of the Sony rootkits they inadvertently installed a couple of years back, didn’t load the entirety of Jobs’ essay? In addition to skipping the essay’s anti-DRM railing, they missed this bit:
“Apple has concluded that if it licenses FairPlay to others, it can no longer guarantee to protect the music it licenses from the big four music companies.”
Unless that’s what the RIAA wants–all of the rigamarole and pain-in-the-ass aspects of DRM, but none of the “security” it allegedly offers. And honestly, given their recent track record, we’re not so willing to rule that idea out.
Jobs to DRM: Drop Dead [Bit Player, via Listening Post]
Earlier: Steve Jobs To Record Labels: Tear Down Your DRM Wall
They appear to be adopting the GW Bush school of fact reinterpretation…I guess if worked for a war, why not records?
This is pathetic, but it’s honestly the only thing they can write in response because Jobs so totally has their number. His logic in the essay is so sound (even if it is shamelessly self-serving for Apple), all they can do is (agreed, beta.rogan, this is so Bush/Rove-like) highlight the one bit that works in their favor: interoperability. It’s lawyerly in its evil logic – Really? You’re thinking about licensing FairPlay? Yes, thank you very much, we will take that. What, the rest of the essay? LaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLa!!! [sticking fingers in ears]
Obviously, Jobs’s essay was the first shot in the long-anticipated iTunes Song Pricing Renegotiation Of ‘07. It was his opening serve, it was low-down and dirty, and this is their even nastier response.
The “open letter” was definitely a semi-veiled threat from Jobs to the labels that they better not jack with the amount he has to pay for songs Apple sells on iTunes. Incredibly self-serving on the part of Jobs, but he IS a corporate head, so what else is to be expected? The RIAA is ALSO a big corporation who is desperately trying to maintain the status quo on their end. The RIAA (and the equally myopic labels) are starting to look more and more like the French plantation family that still sips Bordeaux and sits on chintz sofas half way up the river in “Apocalypse Now” – while Charlie and Hendrix-blaring narco-Marines fill in the landscape around them.
Not even Dennis Hopper cares if music video directors get their cut.