OK, NOW I'm really confused...
Steve Jobs of Apple wants the recorded music industry to consider getting rid of its various, insidious, and ineffective attempts at digital rights management (DRM), formerly known as "copy protection." This would open up the online music market considerably, and be something Apple would embrace wholeheartedly, Jobs said.
Wonderful ideas, all. Also only a matter of time, if the entertainment/"content" industry's history with home media recording and playback technologies ranging from the phonograph to television to the VCR is any accurate indication.
However, the very same Steve Jobs won't let non-iPod users become iTunes customers, not even if they were willing to pay a financial premium. That would open up iTunes considerably -- but it just might slow iPod sales, which generate far higher profits for Apple.
Apple's Jobs also won't let Macintosh users run virtual copies of the Mac OS X operating system. Now, there are all kinds of good reasons to be able to run virtual copies of OS X, for enterprises supporting Mac users and for consumers as well, as a quick search for online info on "virtualization" should make clear. This would especially be true if I could run Mac OS X on less expensive PC hardware -- you know, like the Intel Corp. chips now inside all the new Macintosh systems.
But of course, this might hurt Macintosh hardware sales.
It's not impossible to do technologically. There are already OS X images online that will run in virtual environments. They're not sanctioned or supported by Apple, and they almost definitely violate Apple intellectual property rights. But they demonstrate a curiosity, if not an actual desire, for features Apple could provide and support, but is not. (Microsoft is almost as bad, by the way -- you can only virtualize the more expensive versions of Windows Vista, for example. You can read a very informative blog about this by "The PC Doctor," Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, at http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/wp-trackback.php?p=257.)
DRM is like global warming -- it seems that all but the most die-hard contrarians have admitted that
both exist, and are inherently damaging to the larger ecosystem. But where DRM is concerned, at least some IT industry leaders appear to be speaking inconsistently. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have both been reported as not thinking very much of the current state of DRM, as reported by Playfuls.com. However, some of my industry contacts indicate that in the closed negotiations going on among IT and content vendors and standards promulgators, things are very likely to get much worse before they get any better for business users or consumers.
