Steve Jobs Steals My Math and uses it to Smacks Detractors

People have been belly-aching about Apple’s iTunes DRM for months, complaining that it’s somehow more restrictive then says Microsoft’s brown brick, the Zune. Steve (El Capitain) Job’s has been largely silent. Until now. Today Apple’s CEO came out swinging. In a letter posted on the Apple site, not only does he lay-the-smack-down on the “free iTunes” contingent but he steals my math to do it. A large part of his argument virtually mirrors the analysis I did way back in April of last year. Namely that most of the music on iPods is not from iTunes. Should I expect a check?

My five sentence summary of Steve’s 1800 word rant is:
iPods rock, DRM sucks. The labels made me put DRM on iPods before they’d license any music to me. If I open Apple’s DRM to every joe-blow company that comes asking Apple’s products would suck as much as Microsoft’s Zune. Only 3% of the songs on most iPods is from the iTunes music store the rest is from other sources.

My favorite quote:

“The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat.”

Read the full letter here, to find the first two alternatives.

Thanks to Jake Walker for the news via Pho.