Steve Jobs Killed Music DRM - Why Not Movies?

In 2007, Steve Jobs, riding high on the iPod's wave of success, penned an essay that ignited a firestorm. It was more than just a blog post – it was a declaration of war against Digital Rights Management (DRM), the invisible chains shackling our digital lives.

Jobs, the master showman, was playing a high-stakes game, and just a few months later the major music companies reneged and music began being sold free of DRM protection in a variety of open formats across the internet.

Let's take a look at how this happened.

In 'Thoughts on Music,' Jobs began by addressing the multitude of requests for Apple to remove DRM from the iTunes platform, which would allow music purchased on any marketplace to flow freely between devices from different manufacturers.

At the time, if you bought music from iTunes, it was wrapped in a proprietary DRM module called FairPlay, and could only play on Apple software. In essence, DRM works by encrypting your media files. When you play a file encrypted with DRM your device sends an authorization request to a license server, which responds with a secret. The secret allows the media to be unscrambled and play normally. No secret, no playable content.

This largely happens in the background and when it works well you'd be forgiven if you didn't notice. Many things in tech are this way, but we can draw an analog to the real world to further illustrate the absurdity of this process. This is like buying a car and needing to get the dealer's permission every time you start it. If the dealer isn't answering or goes out of business you're shit out of luck.

DRM also allows platforms to lock down the amount of devices content can be played on. If you've used iTunes in the past you might have run against the authorization/deauthorization process for a new laptop, forcing you to jump through a few hoops and unentangle an older device before you can listen to your legally purchased music.

These restrictions also limit your ability to share media with friends and family and can result in a total loss of your investment if a platform goes bust or decides they don't want you as a customer anymore.

There is also the issue of platform lock-in. There is almost zero interoperability between marketplaces and the impact of this is that if you buy media from Apple, you're stuck using Apple apps to view it. Same with Amazon, Youtube, whatever.

To be clear, it wasn't just Apple doing this, all major marketplaces at the time had negotiated similar arrangements with the major music companies.

What was true then about music was that the vast majority, as Jobs points out, was sold physically, without DRM protection.

In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free  and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.

Jobs also threw out a zinger about the efficacy of DRM in the first place:

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy.

While Jobs' crusade led to a DRM-free music landscape, the film industry remains stubbornly attached to this outdated technology. Today, the vast majority of digital movies are locked behind DRM walls, leaving consumers with a frustrating and fragmented experience.

The Alternative Theory

When Jobs wrote his essay, Rod Schultz was an engineer on the FairPlay team. Some years later he published a paper, 'The Many Facades of DRM,' in which he details an alternative theory:

(...) DRM is an instrumental technology in creating and shaping business models for digital content distribution. Without DRM the iTunes store would never have been born. No music label would have licensed content to Apple, and the majority of the general public would not have purchased iTunes content that didn't come from a major label. It was only after the service became mature and too powerful that the music labels changed the rules of the game and went DRM-free.

To plainly restate the argument it seems that his belief is that Apple was happy to adopt DRM for the benefits to its model until they were large enough push back and score points with their customers.

There is even some question as to whether or not freedom for the homies was even a goal. According to several sources within the music business, the major studios were already considering removing DRM at the time.

Schulz writes:

Maybe Steve Jobs was really trying to spin a pending decision by the music industry into a public perception victory for Apple. The truth was that with the power of its DRM Apple was locking the majority of music downloads to its devices, the most important of which was the iPod. The music industry didn't go DRM free because they hated DRM; they went DRM free because they were fearful of the leverage Apple was gaining with their iTunes + FairPlay + iPod combination. Apple’s DRM created this lock, and it became so successful that the music industry went with the lesser of two evils (songs locked to Apple’s iPod monopoly vs. the distribution of DRM-free music) and chose to distribute DRM-free music.

According to the Digital Entertainment Group (DEG), consumer spending on digital home entertainment in the US was $31.2 billion in 2023, while physical disc sales (DVD and Blu-ray) were $1.56 billion. That means digital sales accounted for roughly 95% of the market.

While this necessitates that the argument of unfair restrictions applying only to a small subset of sales is rendered moot, it also opens up a new argument that most of the media that most people are buying is unfairly restricted. Even though they're outsold, physical blu-rays and dvds are still sold without DRM protection on the open market. You can still buy a movie and mint a fresh copy in an open format for use as you wish.

Unfortunately for us, Schulz predicts that DRM for movies is here to stay, at least until the balance of power shifts to the distribution side:

The same content protection needs apply for movies (...) DRM provides the digital security that studios (Disney, Fox, Warner Brothers) require a digital content distributer (Apple, Amazon, Netflix) to provide. For video, DRM is even more important, and the studios can still set the rules without yielding to a public demand for DRM-free movies. Until the world evolves to a point where this digital security impacts the revenue or future growth of the studio, DRM will be required.

I agree with this take. The truth is, DRM's fate often hinges not on ethical debates, but on cold, hard power dynamics.

The ownership anxiety is real. I do worry about buying digital media and not having access to it. I agree that it's more convenient, and for the types of movies that I like to watch, often more affordable. But I can't shake the sense that what I'm buying is not a digital version of a blu-ray. I can't sell or trade it, I can't leave it to my kids when I die, I can't even leave it to my future self – there's no way to even ensure I'll have access to it in a couple of years.

Jobs' legacy reminds us that even giants can be toppled. If consumers demand change, if we support platforms and technologies that prioritize ownership and interoperability, we can break free from the DRM stranglehold. The fight for our films won't be easy, but the alternative – a future where our digital libraries are held hostage – is simply unacceptable.