So, the DRM industry noticed

The responses to Steve Jobs’ “let’s abandon DRM” memo have been pretty amusing so far. The first one, from the RIAA itself, was Orwellian in its wrongness: they thanked Jobs for his offer to license FairPlay, which is actually something Jobs’ letter explicitly said was off the table. Good luck on that reading comprehension problem, doofuses.

Even more bizarre, though, was the response from the head of the DRM firm Macrovision; you know Macrovision; they’re the people who make it difficult to copy VHS tapes. Anyway, the response is a very model of PR bullshit, chock full of deliberate misstatements and outright lies, which is why we’re very happy that Jon Gruber over at Daring Fireball has provided a handy translation.

In Macrovision’s world, the solution is not to abandon DRM; it’s to make it universal, so that the content makers can charge you for a song you play on your iPod, and then charge you again to play it at home, and charge you a third time to use it for a ringtone. They don’t want you to ever actually own any content in the way we all now own and control CDs. We suspect they think they’ve hidden this goal in their response, but Gruber makes it very clear what their real goals are.

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