Those of you teaching Free Culture may be interested to hear that Steve Jobs recently wrote about Digital Rights Management in the iTunes store. His argument boils down to "DRM don't work and it's never gonna." It's interesting to compare this to Cory Doctorow's anti-DRM op-ed piece from last summer. Doctorow alleged that Jobs wants to control the music industry and prevent iPod users from switching to other music players. Jobs doesn't mention Doctorow directly, but he clearly responds to some of Doctorow's positions.

Unsurprisingly, the music industry failed to announce their sudden conversion to the holy gospel of unprotected music files. During a conference call about Warner Music's earnings, Warner's CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. dismissed Jobs' argument, saying "The notion that music does not deserve the same protections as software, television, film, video games or other intellectual property simply because there is an unprotected legacy product available in the physical world is completely without logic or merit." There's more to his remarks, which are available in a complete transcript of the call.

And to round it all up, The Economist printed a commentary on Jobs' essay (asserting that he's self-serving but right), and by Leonardo Chiariglione, who asserts that DRM hasn't failed, it just needs to be standardized. (For those who, like me, haven't heard of Chiariglione before, he's not in the mafia. He's the chairman of the Motion Pictures Experts Group, a trade association which created the DVD technical specifications.)

With the exception of Doctorow's article, all of this took place in the last week. It might be interesting to have a class read these articles and then hold a debate. Or write analyses of the pieces perhaps; or trace debates. I thought of asking my students to debate whether Doctorow's presentation of Jobs was fair or not, but unfortunately Doctorow's essay appeared in their first assignment. I've found that class discussion of a text they're supposed to analyze independently greatly narrows their thinking. They tend to wind up repeating whatever was said in class. Anyway, I hope some of you find this useful or at least interesting.