I'm glad Steve Jobs has come out against DRM, but I'm slightly cynical over the reasons.

Apple has benefitted tremendously from DRM over the last few years. Jobs claims otherwise, claiming that nobody would feel locked into their music player platform over 5-10% of their music collection, but personally I can't see how you could reach that conclusion.

Now two things have happened. First, Apple's entry into the mobile phone market looks set to entirely upset the iPod business. This is partially because most MP3 players will be cellphones in the next few years. This meant Apple needed to get a majority marketshare of that market to continue to have a viable iTunes Music Store (which currently benefits from selling to the vast majority of MP3 players - by unit, not by model.) But, with the best will in the world, I don't see the proposed Apple iPhone as being something that'll dominate the market that way. And because Apple is now in competition with the other cellphone makers, they're less likely (if at all) to want to license iTunes for their own phones, if indeed Apple would license a non-crippled version.

Result? The entire symbiotic relationship of the iTS and iPod is coming to an end and Apple, far from having a solution in sight, has rejected the solutions to that issue (licensing, or low cost market dominating iPod cellphones.) Perhaps either was unpalatable to a company that prides itself on control over its own products, as licensing would have put hardware in the hands of Nokia and Motorola, and building cheap cellphones would have put them at the mercy of the carriers. (Or perhaps Jobs actually doesn't like DRM.)

The second thing that's happened is Microsoft's Vista operating system. This has been built with a significantly higher level of DRM support than previous operating systems, and according to Jobs, the implementation is more closed than ever before. This means that Mac users will, over time, become locked out of a significant amount of Windows content, and Apple cannot play the same tactic with its own DRM schemes because it will never gain the same marketshare that Microsoft has, not as long as Apple ties Mac OS X to Macintoshes, and probably not even if it didn't, so it will always be in the interests of publishers who want DRM to opt for the Windows version.

So, we're left with a situation where Fairplay, Apple's DRM scheme, is in serious trouble. As iPods cease to be the dominant player, the reason for publishers to use Fairplay decreases, and Microsoft's alternative becomes more dominant, making Apple's hardware and software less able to play with the outside world.

There's a common cause Apple suddenly has with the rest of the non-Microsoft community, and it would be nice to see Apple work with that. But I think Steve Jobs, while being honest in his call for less DRM and his evaluation of the situation regarding licensing Fairplay, is having to deal with far more issues than those mentioned in the article.

And despite his apparent generic dislike for DRM, Jobs has approvingly talked about the copy and access prevention schemes for systems like Blu-ray in the past. Mac OS X is still tied to Apple hardware by legal means and, with Intel CPUs, the use of TCM. It's also worth noting that you can't sell DRM-free music on iTunes. Various publishers have tried, notably Nettwerk, but Apple has refused to let them. Presumably if all four publishers mentioned in the letter come out against DRM too, then Apple will relent. But what are the chances of that happening? What if just three say "No DRM"?