Nosce te ipsum

A little mud slinging going on this morning from Napster CEO Chris Gorog who recently did a piece for Engadget where he calls Steve Jobs "frightened". Fair enough, very similar to the types of things he's said before, but his article was amusing none the less. Here's a few choice tidbits:

When asked about reports that Mr. Jobs had sent an e-mail to record execs about an easy way around Napster To Go -- the company's implementation of Windows Media (WMA) digital rights management (DRM) that allows users to take rented music with them on their digital media devices -- encryption, Mr. Gorog told Engadget:

My first reaction was that he must be pretty frightened of the Napster To Go technology to be so petty. Frankly, that's what I think the impetus was for him to fire that off. It was really pretty silly.

He was claiming we had some sort of security gap, and of course we didn't. That technology — like recording something off of a radio broadcast — had been out there for 10 years. Certainly his service is susceptible to it as well.

We saw it as a sign of weakness, that he's very concerned about a technology that makes his hardware and his software irrelevant in our view.

He further went on to say he doesn't expect Napster will ever be hacked, that WMA DRM is "pretty good," that the limitations Napster places on how many devices and computers (three and three, respectively) is "liberal," and that iPod users will eventually get tired of all the obstacles they have in the digital music world.

"The Apple technologies will always be what they have always been: really great in a completely closed, proprietary world," he said. "But at some point, people will lose their sense of humor about that when they realize that they're constantly running into situations and obstacles where they have a technology that has not been built on an open platform."

Full interview