Richard Staeuber on iTMS’ compliance problems in Europe
Friday, February 9th, 2007My friend and colleague Richard Staeuber has been interviewed by TheStreet.com about the headwind Apple is facing in many European countries because of its non-interoperable DRM system (FairPlay).
The article also mentions that Steve Jobs has recently blamed the major labels for obliging Apple to impose DRM protection on iTunes, and that he would be happy to sell non-DRM’ed music. EFF’s Jason Shultz doubts that this statement could be taken at face value.
At the current state of play it doesn’t seem to make much business sense to try to bind consumers to iPods through iTunes: First, the vast majority of songs played on iPods is not DRMed, and–as anti-DRM activists rightly claim–it is logically impossible to prevent the use of non-DRMed music by selling DRMed music. Second, iPods somehow appear to be cooler than a) iTunes files and b) MP3 players of Apple’s competitors, and they’re expensive: If a consumer wants to replace her iPod, I surmise that it would be cheaper in most cases to replace it by a no-name player and either burn-and-rip her iTunes or buy the respective songs at another online music store, than buying a new iPod.
My take on the story is that Steve Jobs’ statement is compatible with Apple’s business interests–at least in the short or mid-term. The situation would only be different if a) the next generation of iPods is a flop or if b) non-DRMed music were not available anymore.
