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Have you read Steve Jobs' 'Thoughts on Music'? In the space of 1900 words, he admits that Apple's systems are proprietary, while pointing out that its hands are tied. Apple would love to ship non-rights-managed (DRM-free) music, but it can't right now. We knew that.

Among the very simply-worded sentences, though, which I suspect were written for the benefit of ignorant lawyers and broadcasters, rather than us end users, he did pop out some very interesting points. I'll save you reading it, by scooting through the highlights here.

Like the fact that while today's most popular iPod - the 4GB nano - holds 1000 songs, each iPod owner has bought, on average, just 22 songs from the iTunes store. That's 3% of the total content, and the rest is DRM-free. So, as Jobs points out, you can hardly claim that iPod users are 'locked into the iTunes store to acquire their

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music'.

He goes on to explain that, despite this, it is important that Apple doesn't license its own FairPlay DRM, as many would like to see it do. The strength of FairPlay, he explains, is in its exclusivity. If it was to license it to other companies, it would inevitably leak and be cracked, and the music companies would terminate their distribution agreements.

The answer, then, is to go all-out for a DRM-free world. 'Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat,' Jobs explains. And why? In his own words: 'DRMs haven't worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy.'

Yet here's the rub. In 2006, less than 2 billion DRM-protected songs were shipped, and the only reason they were protected was that the music companies insisted that's the way things were. At the same time, though, those same companies shipped 20 billion DRM-free tracks on CDs, because no CD player supports any kind of rights management system.

Game, set and match Jobs. He has exposed the whole industry as a charade, a sham, and painted Apple once again as the knight in shining armour, fighting for the rights of us little guys.

'So if the music companies are selling over 90% of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system?' he asks, as he closes what would have been a masterful performance in any witness box, before answering the question himself: 'There appear to be none'.