Hip Hip Hooray for Steve Jobs!

On February 6, Steve Jobs posted an open letter on Apple's Website pressuring record companies to drop anti-piracy technology. If the record companies do so, Apple has promised to open its iTunes store to other portable players besides the iPod. In his letter, Jobs blames the recording companies for the fact that iTunes songs can only be played on iPods, and that you can only sync from one computer to your iPod (unless you want to erase everything on your iPod) and for why you can't sync from your iPod to your computer (like you can with most other mp3 players). Jobs said the four biggest music labels insisted on the technology before licensing the songs for sale through iTunes. Apple would be willing to abandon Digital Rights Management systems, he said, if only the music labels would agree.

We give two thumbs up to Jobs. It's about time the consumers stopped getting the short end of this stick. Households have multiple computers, people use home and work computers, and let's not even discuss what happens when you go on vacation and want to download some more tunes from your laptop. Tough luck. The iPod's aggravating limitations on syncing music angered me so much, I refused for the longest time to cave and buy an iPod. I guess I owe Steve Jobs and Apple an apology. I often wondered why a company would make such a great product with such aggravating limitations. I half-wondered whether the recording industry had something to do with it, and now those suspicions have been confirmed. I applaud Steve Jobs for finally stepping up and using the iTunes and iPod consumer power to pressure the recording industry into doing what it should have done from the beginning.

Shall we talk furthermore about the copy protection on various CDs, which sometimes makes it impossible for you to burn CD's onto your computer to sync with your iPod? No, I don't think there's any need to go there.

It sucks. We all know it sucks, and frankly, it's the reason I don't buy CD's anymore. It's also the reason WHY a lot of people still exchange pirated music. Pirated music is free of such ridiculous limitations. Furthermore, consumers just plain "angry" at the recording industries often rationalize their pirating as "getting back at" the evil recording industry.

So, it's time we stopped hurting consumers and burdening technology that could be great simply to presever the already overinflated profits of the record companies.