Is Jobs Jobbing us?
Steve Jobs does an excellent job of sitting on a fence. He states that only 3% of the music on the average ipod is purchased from itunes with DRM. How could he be affecting the freedom of the music lover if only 3% of the songs are affected? His reasoning is based on the number of iPods purchased (90 million) and the number of songs purchased through itunes (2 billion songs). What kind of figures would he see if there wasn’t protection on all songs purchased from itunes? Would the figure climb to 10 billion or 20 billion songs? Where is the balancing point for Apple dollars and anti-piracy protection? I think Jobs has done a marvelous job in selling the major studios on his DRM venture even though it isn’t working. It is almost like the ipod is functioning on a different format when it comes to itunes. Look at what happened to the Sony video format of Betamax vs. VHS. I think the industry will shake out and adopt some standards for music.
Our second article in two weeks from John Perry Barlow was again very entertaining. I enjoyed his history references of the masters and their lack of anti-piracy concerns many centuries ago. He states that the future will win and there will be no property in cyberspace. Behold DotCommunism. As formats and technology changes, the rules and regulations have to change too. We are looking at the internet and piracy as if it is something new and different. Valenti references the questions the MPAA had with VCR’s and duplication problems. They believed that the act of copying a VHS tape would kill the motion picture industry. As the industry grew, safeguards were put in place to attempt to protect the creative license of the industry and actors. The internet isn’t any different from the video questions of 30 years ago. We just haven’t solved the problem of piracy yet. Maybe it will become a non-issue. By the time we find a solution, we will be on to the next big technological breakthrough and the internet will be very “has been�.