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Surprisingly the best reaction-piece to today’s DRM-ditch announcement doesn’t come from Daring Fireball (there is a a nice little piece and I expect more from Gruber soon)… it was instead this piece by the Engadget team that impressed me most:

Apple and EMI ditching DRM is good, but it’s not good enough:

Last night the lot of us Engadget editors went to bed with sweet dreams of a DRM-free world dancing through our little heads. Lo and behold, this morning we woke up and to our pleasant surprise, EMI announced that in conjunction with Apple, it would make its entire digital catalogue available on iTunes completely DRM-free. The watershed moment we’ve all been waiting for — the first of the Big Four music businesses makes one of the most pro-consumer moves we’ve seen in years. Or did they? Was today’s announcement a real commitment dedicated to consumers’ digital rights? Or was it a play for disenfranchised music lovers’ hearts? We have a feeling the answer lies somewhere in the middle — although we can’t help but feel the whole thing is gestural at best, and subterfuge at worst. Here’s why.

Read the rest.

Three things I’d like to note in reply:

Engadget’s criticism for Apple for still selling AAC tracks instead of generic MP3′s seems kind of frivolous to me. It’s like winning a computer and complaining that you didn’t also win a monthly stipend to cover increased power bill you get because of the computer. My point is that if the tracks are DRM-free then you are free to cross-convert them to any format you wish, including generic MP3s, very easily (iTunes will even do this for you). Sure many devices don’t support AAC now but that can be easily fixed with a firmware update. I even suspect that AAC support will become more common now that iTunes sells DRM-free tracks too. Also, Engadget’s mentions several MP3-player manufacturers that don’t support AAC, but one class of device that they don’t mention is cell phones where AAC support is fairly common (most MP3 playing Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Nokia phones support the format).

Second is an issue that I haven’t seen discussed anywhere today. Two background facts about the new DRM-free system: 1) You’ll be able to ‘upgrade’ your past purchases to high-quality DRM-free tracks for 30¢/each, and 2) DRM-free full album purchases will not cost any extra once this system goes live. So my question is, what about full albums that I’ve purchased in the past but now want to upgrade to be DRM-free? Will it still be 30¢/track? What if it’s a 30-track album? That’s a $9 upgrade if I have to buy every track, which is probably close to the original purchase price. It would be nice to see a flat album upgrade fee (I would say $3 or less would be a fair price).

Finally, what about the free iTunes singles? Will they be available as high-quality DRM-free files (provided the record label is one that allows this)? Can I upgrade past free ‘purchases’?

In any case, this is interesting news and I’m excited to see how it all develops.

iTunes 7.1, now with full screen Cover Flow. I always wondered why full screen wasn’t an option from the beginning… nice to have it now though. New sorting options too. Essentially you can make iTunes sort by last name without changing the artist tag to ‘Last, First’ and stuff like that. Check the sort tab when editing info for a song. It’s kind of complicated (see the last few paragraphs of this article for a good explanation, this script helps too) but nice to have once you figure it out.

Engadget posted a nice run down of responses to Steve Job’s ‘Thoughts on Music‘ (mentioned here). The article, titled DRM: the State of Disrepair, the article also looks at the most popular DRM protection schemes in use today and highlights how they have been broken. It’s well worth a read, especially if you’re not familiar with different DRM schemes.

Update: One of the responses that the Engadget mentions is from Macrovision CEO Fred Amoroso. It’s particularly idiotic and laced with PR-Speak, so the ever poignant Daring Fireball provides this translation. Here’s an excerpt of the translation relating to interoperable DRM:

Magic interoperable DRM would give people all the features and capabilities they get with DRM-free media.

Today Steve Jobs released this open letter discussing the current status of selling DRMed music online and several posibilites for the future of onine music distribution.

The crux of the piece is that Apple would sell DRM free music if the big 4 music labels allowed this on the iTunes store, indeed Apple would prefer this to selling DRMed music.

It’s a fascinating read for several reasons. It’s an interesting new perspective on the business. But even more interesting is that Steve deemed this topic worthy enough to release this kind of statement. It’s not often you see this kind of open communication from a company like Apple, especially Steve himself.

I think it’s odd that Apple software engineers created an explicit dialog box for when you are in the middle of a TV show download and tell iTunes to quit:

I’m assuming there are similar ones for music/movies/podcasts? (I’ll have to try those out…)