But here is a short summary on the matter.

1. It was designed to move the DRM meme discussion back at the European recording companies and away from iPod+iTunes.

2. Lets be honest, digital content, requires Digital rights Management. Whether its music, videos, movies, books, photos. — In an increasingly digital world – we need such a framework, to suggest that we should get rid of it is pure folly — which is all the more remarkable that Jobs said it — but you need to read between the lines.

3. Eventually, we will live in a world of pure Internet/Digital distribution — one day Record companies wont be selling CD’s. We all know that day will come one day, and when that day comes, and Steve knows it will — we will have no choice but as consumers to pay with DRM.

4. But that day hasn’t arrived today — nobody wants to cannibilize sales or shrink the PIE until the right time. So we obviously live in this uneasy future and past world. The past, being CD’s, the future, being digital. It suits Steve to poo poo DRM because, it takes the heat of iPod+iTunes, he becomes the good guy, fighting the consumer’s cause, today.

5. The record companies, not Apple, will become the bad guys, tomorrow. Because they know they cannot do without DRM. Steve has planted the seeds for that blame by his email. either way he wins with or without DRM.

– One final point, In the sudden gush of discussions over the last few months, have we all suddenly lost our senses and think that we can live in a world if digital intellectual property with out any form of protection for the artist?

His keynotes are a giveaway — he speaks with equal passion about the design of his products and his market share / revenue / download figures.

And NeXT and Pixar were actually great long term investments — the payoffs being Mac sales thanks to OSX and Disney’s acquisition.

They also demonstrate his other conviction — that he knows what people want (or will want) better than they do themselves. When Steve appears to be wrong, it’s just because the rest of the world hasn’t yet figured out what right looks like.

And Cory’s questions — why doesn’t iTunes currently sell DRM-free music from labels that don’t demand DRM and DRM-free Disney movies — have no satisfactory answer other than that to date, DRM has suited the iPod/iTunes business model very well.

Faced with the need to license or find a standardised alternative to fairplay (both expensive to implement and user-unfriendly options), the alternative of losing DRM entirely is clearly the best alternative for Apple, and coincidentally the consumer.

Don’t get me wrong, the guy’s a hero of mine and I’d love to see iTunes go DRM-free, but I’ve rarely seen him admit he’s wrong about anything, and I’m not so sure he just started…

That mindset would have found DRM a real problem. So first chance he gets, he’s out of it. I am convinced that it was the iTunes and Vista problems that finally did it.

If you’re trying to make “the computer for the rest of us” then part of the magic, the brand experience, whatever you want to call it, is that the system works the same way the user’s mental model of the system works. People don’t have DRM-system-like mental models of what bits to use how.

Some DRM vendors want to retrain the user, but that’s what pre-Mac-HIG software people tried and failed at.