Decius wrote:

This is a big day -- a huge day. If Steve Jobs comes through with his promise to offer DRM-free music from artists who will allow it, we're at the beginning of the end of the DRM wars.

Ha! I don't think Jobs predicted that some artists would respond to his essay by insisting that they undrm their music on the iTunes Store. He may have offered more than he bargained for.

Well, if it forces apple to implement a more sophisticated mechanism, enabling DRM where mandated by licence, but not otherwise, i suppose that's good.

The main reason, i think, Apple doesn't want to do that is because of the fear of confusing the consumer base. Apple's big on that, and obviously we all know that it'd be pretty easy to DRM some things and not others, technology-wise. It's purely a marketing decision they made.

We'll see what happens. Still, I think it's clear that a more fine grained approach to DRM has costs in terms of complexity. "ON" or "OFF" isn't much more complicated than just picking one of the two and sticking with it, but anything more detailed than that gets pretty crazy for a layman.