I never want to disappoint Jim (and in my timezone it’s only 9:46 AM, so he wins his bet), but I don’t have a whole lot to say about this other than “duh”.
Update: Well, OK, I do have one other thing to say about Goldberg’s comments: Steve Jobs agrees with him:
A lot of [music execs] didn’t use computers–weren’t on e-mail; didn’t really know what Napster was for a few years. They were pretty doggone slow to react. Matter of fact, they still haven’t really reacted, in many ways. And so they’re fairly vulnerable to people telling them technical solutions will work, when they won’t. When we first went to talk to these record companies–you know, it was a while ago. It took us 18 months. And at first we said: None of this technology that you’re talking about’s gonna work. We have Ph.D.’s here, that know the stuff cold, and we don’t believe it’s possible to protect digital content.
Of course, he doesn’t talk about this point much now that DRM is helping Apple to cement their dominance of the digital music business. But Jobs knows perfectly well that DRM doesn’t benefit the recording industry.
It’s a safe bet that Larry Page knows it too, but made the same calculation Jobs did: Hollywood won’t do business with Google unless Google agrees to wrap their content in DRM.
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