Apple was forced by major record labels to implement digital rights management technology in iTunes, according to testimony in an ongoing class-action lawsuit that accuses Cupertino of stifling competition with competing music services.
Apple contemplated licensing its DRM, called FairPlay, to other companies, “but we couldn’t find a way to do that and have it work reliably,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet software and services.
“Cue argued that Apple abhorred DRM, but had to implement it in order to broker deals with record labels that collectively controlled 80 percent of the music market,” reports The Verge.
Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller, Cue and even Steve Jobs (via old emails and videotaped deposition) are star witnesses in the weeklong trial, which will determine whether Apple will have to pay at least $350 million in damages for blocking competitors from working with the iPod and iTunes.
Along with yesterday’s revelation that Apple deleted music off iPods from rival music services, DRM used during the early days of iTunes is one of the reasons the company has been dragged into court.
“Steve [Jobs] was mighty upset with me and the team whenever we got hacked,” said Cue. “If a hack happened, we had to remedy that hack within a certain time period or they [the record labels] would remove all their music from the store.”
Schiller says having two DRMs for iPod would be like “having two steering wheels in a car. You can’t have two people trying to drive.”
— Brian X. Chen (@bxchen) December 4, 2014
Apple still uses FairPlay encryption, but consumers haven’t had to deal with it in music for years. Music is protected from hackers by FairPlay while on Apple’s servers, but the DRM is stripped out upon downloading. Apps and e-books still include FairPlay when downloaded.
Alex Heath is a journalist who works for Tech Insider. He’s the former co-host of The CultCast. He has been quoted by the likes of the BBC, KRON 4 News, and books like “ICONIC: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation.” He lives in Lexington, Kentucky. If you want to pitch a story, share a tip, or just get in touch, additional contact information is available on his personal site. Follow him on Twitter.
4 responses to “Eddy Cue blames record labels for craptastic iTunes DRM”
Stupid lawsuit by people clueless about the industry then and how technology worked.
This is a simple lawsuit: Apple has lots of money, and they should give some of it to the lawyers handling this case who have come up with a flimsy excuse for a lawsuit. It doesn’t have to make sense. It’s just a “legal” way for lawyers to take money from a large and successful company. When you hear about these enormous settlements from judgements against large companies, it’s the lawyers that get the huge lump sum of money, and the supposedly hard-done-by consumers that get $5 each for being so damaged by Apple.
Let’s bring back free enterprise where a company is free to come out with its own products that allow or disallow what the products do or don’t do. The market (i.e. the people who buy) will determine the success of the company by buying it or not. To survive in a free market, your product has to be good and actually please people. Governmental interference in areas of technology it doesn’t understand, always leads to catastrophe. At this rate, Apple will eventually get sued because Windows apps won’t run natively on the Mac OS.
Whaaaaaaa! I bought an Andriod tablet and now all my iOS apps wont work on it whaaaaaaaaaaahahahahhaaaaa!!!!
Removal of DRM – now pretty much the only place I buy music is through iTunes BECAUSE they removed DRM from it, and is the only place in NZ you can find pretty much everything legally. Movies, TV books and music videos, however, Apple won’t see any of my money from me for those until they are DRM free too.