Apple's chief executive has just called on record companies to allow music download stores to sell music without anti-piracy controls, according to this washingtonpost report.  This comes just after we hear about news about DRM talks at the LA Music 2.0 conference insisting to either go for a totally interoperable solution or do away with DRM.  Up until now, critics have been complaining about how iTunes has been locking music to the iPod and vice versa with its FairPlay DRM, but according to Jobs, this is what the music industry has insisted on when they originally negotiated deals.  Apple was given just a short time to fix problems if their DRM was compromised to avoid the risk of having the music industry withdraw all its music from the iTunes store.

Jobs is well aware that DRM is ineffective at stopping music piracy and may never do so, particularly with enough people out there willing to share music freely by find out ways around the DRM.  While he knows Apple could license its FairPlay DRM technology to other services, it would just make its DRM technology more susceptible to leaks that would become widely known very quickly once discovered.  Interestingly, the RIAA considers Apple's offer to license FairPlay a welcome breakthrough, which would be a real victory for fans, artists and labels, but showed no interest in addressing the idea of eliminating the dreaded DRM altogether.  Finally, jobs mentioned that those who are unhappy with the current situation should persuade the music companies to license music free of DRM to "create a truly interoperable music market place".

I would certainly agree with Jobs idea of just doing away with DRM.  With Apple already having a bulk of the online music and digital audio player market, they have little to lose if their music was made available free of DRM.  I know this would mean consumers can play iTunes music on competing players, but this would be made up for the extra iTunes sales.  The same goes the other way around where consumers who already have music purchased from Napster, MSN, etc. would be able to buy an iPod to listen to music on.  In fact, it would give iTunes and other online stores an extra advantage, since DRM would no longer be the culprit behind illegal music downloads if stores no longer use it!

Thanks to DamnedIfIKnow for letting us know about this article on this also worth reading, leaving the comment: Now this is a "switch" campaign I can go for! :)"