4 ms·

As other already pointed out, this should only apply to DRM media. DRM-free should imply that the customer is responsible for it once the transfer is done.

alpaca128 5y ago
I'd love for this to happen, not just for the amusement of seeing all the giant corporations suddenly jumping to DRM free distribution to save tons of money, and Tim Cook explaining for 5 minutes how innovative Apple was with reinventing their content distribution model.
- jrockway 5y ago
  I think Apple killed off DRM on music in the late 2000s and indeed, Steve Jobs was quite pleased with himself when announcing it. (What's old is new again -- Epic is basically doing the same thing to Apple now. It all starts when an entrenched monopolist receives an open letter, apparently.)
  - kmeisthax 5y ago
    The funny thing is, Apple had an iron grip on the music market because of DRM. If you wanted to license music for digital download, the music industry demanded DRM, and Apple had the only DRM consumers had any faith in. You couldn't use an alternative DRM scheme with iPods; FairPlay was Apple's proprietary technology and it was the only DRM iPods would recognize. The music industry only caved on DRM specifically because they realized they had written Apple a blank check. Had Apple not had a long and storied history of trademark litigation from The Beatles' record label (also named Apple), they could have started directly signing artists themselves. The difference between then and now with the Epic lawsuit is that iOS has no sideloading option. Going DRM-free meant you could sell music on iPods without paying Apple. For software, the closest equivalent would be webapps on iOS, but that usually entails rewriting significant parts of your app and losing access to certain functionality. You don't get push notifications, you can't access native UI so all your UI code has to be redeveloped to something worse, and so on.

alpaca128 5y ago

I'd love for this to happen, not just for the amusement of seeing all the giant corporations suddenly jumping to DRM free distribution to save tons of money, and Tim Cook explaining for 5 minutes how innovative Apple was with reinventing their content distribution model.

jrockway 5y ago
I think Apple killed off DRM on music in the late 2000s and indeed, Steve Jobs was quite pleased with himself when announcing it. (What's old is new again -- Epic is basically doing the same thing to Apple now. It all starts when an entrenched monopolist receives an open letter, apparently.)
- kmeisthax 5y ago
  The funny thing is, Apple had an iron grip on the music market because of DRM. If you wanted to license music for digital download, the music industry demanded DRM, and Apple had the only DRM consumers had any faith in. You couldn't use an alternative DRM scheme with iPods; FairPlay was Apple's proprietary technology and it was the only DRM iPods would recognize. The music industry only caved on DRM specifically because they realized they had written Apple a blank check. Had Apple not had a long and storied history of trademark litigation from The Beatles' record label (also named Apple), they could have started directly signing artists themselves. The difference between then and now with the Epic lawsuit is that iOS has no sideloading option. Going DRM-free meant you could sell music on iPods without paying Apple. For software, the closest equivalent would be webapps on iOS, but that usually entails rewriting significant parts of your app and losing access to certain functionality. You don't get push notifications, you can't access native UI so all your UI code has to be redeveloped to something worse, and so on.