If you’re one of the few to have already bought Vista, then you may have noticed that iTunes does not want to play nice with your system. The reason: Digital Rights Management. DRM has plagued consumers for quite some time, and now even Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, Inc., has spoken out against DRM. In his February 6th essay, entitled “Thoughts on Music,” Jobs acknowledged the nuisances that DRM imposes on consumers and that Apple would gladly get rid of all of the restrictions if they only could.

The iTunes Music Store, currently the fourth biggest music retailer in the nation, first got on its way in April of 2003 after Apple promised the “big four” music companies (Universal, Sony BMG, Warner, and EMI) that any of its music sold via the iTunes Music Store would be digitally protected with some form of DRM.

Now, one would think that iPod customers would purchase a decent portion of their music from the Apple online music store, right? I mean, after all, it is convenient: select the song you like, select the format, download it, sync it with your iPod and you’re ready to go. As it turns out, the iTunes Music Store really isn’t that popular with iPod users. According to Steve:

“Through the end of 2006, customers purchased a total of 90 million iPods and 2 billion songs from the iTunes store. On average, that’s 22 songs purchased from the iTunes store for each iPod ever sold.

Today’s most popular iPod holds 1,000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1,000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats.”

In effect, what this translates to is that the vast majority of consumers prefer to either purchase CDs, or download their music illegally from various P2P sources.

Jobs goes on to say that the he disagrees with the advocates of DRM who have said that the fact the iTunes Music Store has DRM is beneficial for Apple, because it would ensure that people can only play their DRMed music on an iPod, and that they would therefore be locked into purchasing only iPods. Jobs states that he finds it “hard to believe that just 3% of the music on an average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future.”

In light of the problems that DRM imposed on the consumer as well as upon the content distributors, such as Apple, who have to be on constant alert to ensure that the DRM protocol is up-to-date and impenetrable, Steve suggest three alternative to the whole DRM issue.

The first alternative that he quickly glossed over was the possibility of every company producing its “own ‘top-to-bottom’ proprietary systems for selling, playing and protecting music.” This alternative would surely strangle the industry. Right now there already exist a plethora of such proprietary systems, and although it might sound like a great idea from a lawyer’s perspective, it’s horrible from the consumer’s viewpoint. Take the Zune, for example: before its release, Microsoft already had its own music store, but as soon as the Zune came out they introduced a completely new store. This new Urge Music Store, was not in any way compatible with the other Microsoft-backed store, and many have expressed their frustration over this issue by simply not buying the Zune in the first place. Proprietary systems simply won’t work, and Steve knows this.

The next possibility that Jobs mentioned involves licensing FairPlay, Apple’s DRM system, to current and future competitors “with the goal of achieving interoperability between different company’s players and music stores.” This sounds like a far better choice for the end user, but it would be a logistical nightmare for all of the companies involved in the effort. As Steve notes early on in his essay, in order to have gotten the compliance of the “big four” in the first place, Apple agreed to fix any leaks in the DRM algorithm within a relatively short period (a few weeks, he says). Failure to comply would result in the “big four” removing all of their content from the store until the problem is resolved. The task of monitoring and updating the DRM software is hard enough for a single company as it is; now, imagine having to coordinate a worldwide patch for hundreds of different players, stores, and software applications within the same timeslot – impossible.

The final course of action that Jobs suggests is, as you might have guessed, the complete abolishment of any and all DRM measures. This would be the ultimate dream for both the consumers and the music distributors. It would mean that all of the music, regardless of where it was purchased, could be played back on any device without any compatibility issues whatsoever. Obviously, if this solution were perfect, we would already have it. The one major snag in this proposal is that the industry is dominated by greed, pure and simple.

As Steve gladly points out, “DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work to halt piracy.” The entire approach to stemming the flow of pirated materials is flawed, because the vast majority of the content that is distributed worldwide is not protected in any way, whatsoever.

“In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.”

Steve goes on to say that DRM not only hobbles the consumers, but also poses a huge hindrance to the development of new online music stores and portable music players. This is all because of the massive over-head required to please the tyrannical four.

In his last paragraph, as can be expected, Steve portrays Apple in a favorable light by very simply stating that Apple will wholeheartedly embrace the removal of any and all digital rights management.