About a month ago, Steve Jobs made headlines by publishing his thoughts on music memo. In it, he argued for selling content that was free from digital rights management (DRM) - technology that restricts users from using digital content as they’d like under the guise of preventing copyright infringement.

I like Apple, but I’m not a raving fan who believes they can do no wrong, like some. I love my iPod Nano, and have considered purchasing an iBook in the past… but I never felt like they are a company that can do not wrong - especially when they sued bloggers (and lost).

So I admit that when I first read his memo, I didn’t believe he was sincere. If he really wanted to do something, he would remove DRM from all the indie artists out there who offer their audio on iTunes but would prefer their files not be protected by DRM.

Cory Doctorow responded in a Salon article late last month, saying

DRM’s principal effect is legal, not technical. Since the passage of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it’s been illegal to break DRMs in this country. It doesn’t matter if DRM restricts access to something you have every right to use (for example, a DRM that region-locks a movie you’ve bought so that it won’t play in the U.S.). You’re not allowed to break DRM, and corporations certainly can’t field products that break it. The results are ugly: Companies like 321 Studios (whose DVD X-Copy software lets you make otherwise legal backups of your DVDs) were sued into oblivion by the motion picture companies for trying such a thing.

So if you shellac a one-atom-thick layer of DRM over a product, you get the full power of the American legal system as a weapon to use against competitors. Apple may have created a successful “Switch” campaign by reverse-engineering Microsoft products like PowerPoint to make Keynote, an Apple program that lets you run old PowerPoint decks on your Mac, but Microsoft can’t create a “Switch to the Zune” campaign that offers you the ability to play your iTunes Store songs on a Zune, Microsoft’s latest abortive iPod-killer.

Although Apple’s DRM is wholly ineffective at preventing copying, it does manage to raise the cost of switching from an iPod to a competing device. Every iTunes song you buy for 99 cents amounts to a 99 cent tax on switching from an iPod to a Zune. That’s because your iTunes songs won’t play on your Zune — or on any other player, save those made or licensed by Apple. Jobs tries to skate around this in his memo, suggesting that only a tiny fraction of the music on iPods comes from his music store, and so the anti-switching effects are minimal.

So what, exactly, does Steve Jobs hope to get out of his memo? Maybe some good will - even though he knows that his appeal won’t change anything? It’s more PR than anything, I think.

There is some good news in all of this, though. A few weeks ago, Reps. Rich Boucher (D-Va.) and John Dolittle (R-Calif.) introduced what they call the “Freedom and Innovation Revitalizing U.S. Entrepreneurship” (or FAIR USE) bill, which may crack down on companies that use DRM. They say

“The Digital Millennium Copyright Act dramatically tilted the copyright balance toward complete copyright protection at the expense of the public’s right to fair use,” Boucher said in a statement. “Without a change in the law, individuals will be less willing to purchase digital media if their use of the media within the home is severely circumscribed and the manufacturers of equipment and software that enables circumvention for legitimate purposes will be reluctant to introduce the products into the market.”

Let’s hope that Congress makes this an issue in the upcoming months.