RIAA slams Steve Jobs

While Steve has been banging on about the music companies dropping DRM he has been unwilling to sell his Pixar movies through iTunes without DRM and DVDs without CSS encryption.

Hughes said that when he asked about interoperability of downloads from the iTMS, Jobs said he would only think of that when Apple has less than 50 per cent of the market share again.

Hughes thinks that Jobs posted an Open Letter on DRM to get the attention off of him and the bad press he'd been getting regarding Norway's anti-trust laws.

Hughes was speaking at a bravely held Q&A at Arizona State University. He not only got out alive, but seemed to have made an impression on some of the bloggers who reported the event. Hughes, who used to work at Sony, got away with blaming customers for Britney Spears and rounded on those who he claimed were stealing content.

Observers writing in their bogs said that he made some good points. One said that he managed to show up the chasm between kids and adults when it comes to copyright.

Kids think that if the price of records are too high then they should be able to download them, adults think that sort of thing is justifying theft, one blogger wrote. Other bloggers pointed out that the talk showed how out of touch the RIAA was with its customers.

Hughes was asked what he thought of Consumerist readers naming the RIAA the "Worst Company In America”. He laughed and said that the RIAA had been "beating Exxon-Mobil for years" in that arena.

More here and here. µ