Thoughts on music DRM (The Devil made me do it)

Apple CEO Steve Jobs this week made news with an open letter entitled Thoughts on Music that called for the big music companies to drop their requirements for using digital rights management to sell music in the iTunes store.   DRM Watch says it's "a piece of self-serving misdirection and disingenuousness worthy of a political stump speech."  (Thanks to Stephen Hill for both links.)

Max Kalehoff at MediaPost says that Steve Jobs Is Right: DRM Upsets Consumers.  NPR's Talk of the Nation featured an interview Duke law professor James Boyle on this story (link:  NPR).   Also see John Markoff, Jobs Calls for End to Music Copy Protection (link: New York Times).

The big music companies aren't all buying.  See Greg Keizer, Warner chief calls Jobs' DRM fight 'without logic', (link: Computerworld).  But EMI has apparently been working on this say Louis Hau and Peter Kafka, Will EMI Set Its Music Free (link: Forbes) and also Jeff Leeds, EMI May Sell Recordings Online With No Anti-Copying Software (link: New York Times).  --Dennis