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Consumer Electronics

Apple Wants All Music To Get Stolen

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Steve Jobs. What a guy.

Let all music downloaded over the internet be free of digital rights management. Those nasty record companies don’t want their content stolen.

Job’s reasoning is perverse. Since CDs don’t have digital rights management software and they are 90% of the industry’s revenue, then why should the last 10%, the downloaded content, need protection?

Well, CDs do have protection. Copyright. Just because consumers can steal something does not mean that they are not breaking an agreement. But, in Job’s calculus, everything can be stolen, and, it probably will be. That may sell more  Apple (AAPL) iPods, but it is not good business for the record companies.

Jobs also knows that the best digital right management software in the world is built into the Microsoft (MSFT) Windows Media Player. That helps Microsoft, but over time its hurts Jobs.

But, Jobs love Microsoft.

Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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