Monday, February 19, 2007

The Battle Over DRM: Macrovision & Jobs & Daring Fireball

On legal grounds, the biggest threat to fair use in the U.S. is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). But on practical, logistic grounds, the biggest threat to fair use is digital rights management (DRM) run amok on music and video media. That's why many of us sat up and took notice when Steve Jobs (somewhat hypocritically) called for an examination of DRM and suggested the possibility of abolishing it.

This did not sit well with Fred Amoroso, CEO & President of Macrovision Corporation, a company that has been marketing DRM crap... er... "solutions" for decades. He fired a salvo back at Jobs that was a model of PR double-speak. This did not sit well with John Gruber of Daring Fireball, who offered a "Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Macrovision CEO Fred Amoroso’s Response to Steve Jobs’s ‘Thoughts on Music’". It starts with this helpful translation:
I would like to start by thanking Steve Jobs for offering his provocative perspective on the role of digital rights management (DRM) in the electronic content marketplace and for bringing to the forefront an issue of great importance to both the industry and consumers.
Translation: Fuck you, Jobs.

(This post was cross-posted at MediaCommons.)

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