Aquesta carta sembla una resposta a les protestes (majoritàriament europees) a la tecnologia propietat d'Apple, FairPlay, que l'empresa de Jobs inclou en cadascuna de les cançons que ven a través de la seva tenda en-línia, iTunes, i que impedeix la còpia de les peces adquirides legalment, així com la seva reproducció en altres dispositius que no siguin els seus lluents iPod.

Segons Jobs, aquesta és l’única alternativa viable (abolir el DRM, Digital Rights Management) que li queda, ja que assegura que si obre la tecnologia FairPlay a d’altres fabricants, no es podran garantir els actuals drets dels segells discogràfics.

Amb aquestes declaracions, Jobs, buscaria millorar la imatge mentre mira de treure's les puces de sobre i encolomar-les a la indústria del disc, que és qui controla els drets de la música que distribueix.

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“Perhaps those (..) unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM – free” he said (..)

The songs sold on the service are protected by Apple’s proprietary FairPlay software, which prevents users from making multiple copies for distribution. Mr Jobs said Apple had concluded that if it licenses FairPlay to other companies it could no longer guarantee to protect the music it licenses from the major labels (..)

Instead, he favours abolishing DRM entirely so any MP3 player could play music purchased from any online store. (..)

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Richard Stice, analyst at Standard & Poor’s equity research, said (..) the removal of copyright protection from online music downloads was likely to benefit Apple as the number one player, more than rivals such as Microsoft and Sony.

“I think it’s a pretty smart thing for him to say. If you use [Microsoft’s] Zune, you can’t use iTunes – for Apple, if there’s no DRM, it would open up the market much more.”

In being so public with his views, Mr Jobs may also be trying to put pressure on the major labels where private negotiations have failed. The music industry has been implacable in insisting on copyright protection for downloaded music.

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Jobs argumenta que els "Els DRM's no han funcionat, i segurament mai arribin a funcionar, per tal d'aturar el pirateig de la música".

More than 20bn songs were sold completely DRM-free in 2006 on unprotected CDs by record companies. This was more than 10-times the number of DRM-protected songs sold worldwide by online stores, he says, while only around 3 per cent of the music on the 90m iPods sold to date had been purchased from iTunes.

Mr Jobs’ argument was somewhat at odds with Apple’s complaint last year that a proposed French law making music DRM-free would be tantamount to “state-sponsored piracy.”