Last time I linked to Cory Doctorow involved some degrees of criticism and misunderstanding, so it’s a pleasure this time to point out his incisive diagnosis of Steve Jobs’s double-dealing rhetoric about DRM and music.
Straight to the point from the penultimate paragraph:
Apple doesn’t sell music because of DRM — it sells music in spite of DRM. The iTunes Store proves that you can compete with free. People have bought billions of dollars worth of music from Apple because it offered a better user experience. But no one bought for the DRM. Some people bought in spite of it, some bought in ignorance of it, but there’s no customer for whom DRM is a selling point. No one woke up this morning wishing for a way to do less with her music.
Yes.