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Jobs Says People Don't Want to 'Rent' Music
eldavojohn writes "PhysOrg is running a piece on a recent speech by Apple CEO Steve Jobs about DRM free music. While we know that Jobs is a self proclaimed proponent of DRM free music who's not all talk, he's now said that 'by the end of this year, over half of the songs we offer on iTunes we believe will be in DRM-free versions. I think we're going to achieve that.' Jobs pointed out what's obvious to us, the consumers, but isn't obvious to the music industry — 'People want to own their music.' He also dismissed subscription based music as a failure, and claimed a lot of other music labels are intrigued by the EMI deal."
Jobs also sent out a memo yesterday to all content providers letting them know that any and *all* of them could sign up to provide DRM-free and higher qaulity downloads from May onwards. Hopefully Nettwerk and similar labels will sign up for this, and the remaining major labels either follow suit or get forced out of the music business. Its good to see iTS (and the Amazon store) making steps towards a sensible sales model.
Yes, but you do not own the right to resell the music. Thus, the legal definition is not that of ownership; you are, indeed, licensing it.
The First-sale doctrine, which is both case and codified law, says otherwise.
The first-sale doctrine has not been tested at the supreme court level in relation to downloaded music, but this is one case in which a conservative court is more likely to side against the record industry. The law says what it says; you'd have to be one of those so-called "activist" judges to read something into it other than what's on paper and side with the RIAA.
DRM-free purchased songs are "owned" under the law. Heck, so are DRM'd songs; you just can't legally break the DRM for resale purposes, making the first-sale doctrine moot.
AAC as used by Apple is part of the MPEG-4 standard. Apple didn't invent it and doesn't own it.
All digital music, with the exception of purely synthesized stuff, has to pass through an analog-to-digital conversion process that throws away information (quantizing). So "uncompressed music" is still actually compressed -- and lossy-compressed at that -- if it's in digital form. The question has never been compressed vs. uncompressed, but rather what type and level of information loss you find acceptable.
I'm happy with a compression format that is not encumbered with lots of onerous license terms (i.e., that I could write and distribute an open-source player for if I felt like it) and that produces quality slightly better than the point at which I can hear the difference on a good stereo system. The "slightly better" simply so that if I get an even better stereo system later on, I still won't hear the difference. As long as that baseline is met, I want the format to take as few bytes per song as possible.
Does that make me not "people?"