Computers: February 2007 Archives
Translation From Pundit-Speak to English of Selected Portions of John Gruber's "Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Macrovision CEO Fred Amoroso's Response to Steve Jobs's 'Thoughts on Music,'" Intended In All Good Humour
I would like to start by thanking Steve Jobs for offering his provocative perspective on the role of digital rights management (DRM) in the electronic content marketplace and for bringing to the forefront an issue of great importance to both the industry and consumers.
Fuck you, Jobs.
I'd like to start off with a good laugh line that also immediately lets you, the intended readers, know that I'm on your side.
Macrovision has been in the content protection industry for more than 20 years, working closely with content owners of many types, including the major Hollywood studios, to help navigate the transition from physical to digital distribution.
We've been helping and encouraging the entertainment industry to annoy its paying customers for more than 20 years.
I have an amazing power to state the obvious.
We have been involved with and have supported both prevention technologies and DRM that are on literally billions of copies of music, movies, games, software and other content forms, as well as hundreds of millions of devices across the world.
Remember those squiggly lines when you tried copying a commercial VHS tape? You can thank us for that.
I am old. And that's totally not a bad thing. In this case.
While your thoughts are seemingly directed solely to the music industry, the fact is that DRM also has a broad impact across many different forms of content and across many media devices. Therefore, the discussion should not be limited to just music.
We recognize that if getting rid of DRM works for the music industry, it's going to open the eyes of executives in other fields, and it could unravel Macrovision's entire business.
I have some level of business acumen, and most of you have none -- except what you learn from me -- so you can trust what I am saying is true.
DRM increases not decreases consumer value
Up is down. Black is white.
Did I tell you that I am funny, and can grasp the obvious? Because I am, and I can.
Similarly, consumers who want to consume content on only a single device can pay less than those who want to use it across all of their entertainment areas -- vacation homes, cars, different devices and remotely. Abandoning DRM now will unnecessarily doom all consumers to a 'one size fits all' situation that will increase costs for many of them.
Abandoning DRM will prevent us from forcing our customers to keep paying us over and over again for the same movies and songs they've already paid for.
Um. Wait a second. Did that Macrovision guy just say he wants me to pay more if I listen to music in more than one PLACE?! What the f-- ... oops. I just broke character. OK, back to the translation.
Well maintained and reasonably implemented DRM will increase the electronic distribution of content, not decrease it.
I am high as a kite.
OK, even if you don't find me funny, I am, at the very least, pretty damned hip. Getting high is still hip, right?
At Macrovision we are willing to lead this industry effort.
If we could get everything under our control we could make a lot of money.
I can just imagine Steve Jobs reading my words and nodding and laughing. Maybe he reads Daring Fireball. Even if not, I bet Phil Schiller does, and he probably forwards stuff like this to Steve. But it wouldn't surprise me if Steve reads the site. I mean, who else writes good stuff like this? Sure CARS does, but they also write a bunch of crap, too, and Steve's way too busy to wade through CARS to find the good stuff, you know? Hm. I wonder if he bought a DF membership under an assumed name.
We offer to assist Apple in the issues and problems with DRM that you state in your letter. Should you desire, we would also assume responsibility for FairPlay as a part of our evolving DRM offering and enable it to interoperate across other DRMs, thus increasing consumer choice and driving commonality across devices.
I realize Apple is never going to work with Macrovision, so I have decided to insult you and your company by insinuating that your 'Thoughts on Music' open letter was an expression of frustration at technical hurdles Apple just can't figure out on its own.
Seriously, Mr. Jobs, I totally think you're awesome, and I hope that you understand when you read this that I am just, well, in tune with you. If you'll pardon the pun. Unless you like puns. And I think you do, because I really, really, get you. And I know you don't really want to hire me, and I wouldn't want to, because that is not how blogging should work, but I dunno, maybe we can work something out. How about t-shirts for your employees?
As an industry, we should not let that happen.
As a company whose only purpose is to provide copy protection, we can't let that happen.
Thank you, Macrovision, for giving this story more legs. I am sick of writing about that assclown Enderle.
-s enables rudimentary switch parsing for switches on the command line after the program name but before any filename arguments (or before an argument of --). This means you can have switches with two leading dashes (--help). Any switch found there is removed from @ARGV and sets the corresponding variable in the Perl program. The following program prints "1" if the program is invoked with a -xyz switch, and "abc" if it is invoked with -xyz=abc.
#!/usr/bin/perl -s
if ($xyz) { print "$xyz\n" }
Do note that --help creates the variable ${-help}, which is not compliant with "strict refs".
I use this a lot. A good 20 or so of the scripts I keep in my private bin directory have it, and I use it fairly often for one-offs too. Here's an example, from my bbeditp script:
#!/usr/bin/perl -sIf I call bbeditp Finder, it looks for a perl module named "Finder", and opens it as an text window in BBEdit. If I call bbeditp -g Finder, it looks for a glue doc file for the application "Finder".
our $g;
my $prog = $g ? 'gluedoc' : 'perldoc';
my $doc = shift;
open STDOUT, "|bbedit --view-top --clean -t $doc";
system $prog, '-t', $doc;
"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt."
