Thoughts on ‘DRM’

Tomás F. Serna

March 1, 2007

On February 6, Mr. Steve Jobs, Apple’s Chief Executive Officer published an open letter titled: “Thoughts on Music“.

It seemed to me that this caught everybody in this arena completely off-guard, as such a thing as an open letter from the very secretive Apple (BTW, not Apple Computer anymore), was something unheard of.

This was probably a first step in a strategy towards the heat that Apple is taking from some EU member States on its wildly successful iPod+iTunes endeavor. A strategy that seems to have had its first go made at the PR level. Probably a very wise step.

There have been far too many reactions for me to enumerate or to link to here, but I still would like to offer a thought of my own.

There is clearly a stigma associated with DRM (Digital Rights Management), technologies. The most widely spread assumption seems to be that DRM embody or inherently represent evil. (more…)