Apr 3, 2007 5:08 PM

Steve Jobs: Free the Music, but Lock Up the Video

IDG News Service asked Steve Jobs whether he’d support the removal of copy protection from online video, as he’s doing with freely copyable music with the iTunes-EMI deal. No way, said Jobs: Video is pretty different from music right now because the video industry does not distribute 90 percent of their content DRM free. Never […]

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IDG News Service asked Steve Jobs whether he'd support the removal of copy protection from online video, as he's doing with freely copyable music with the iTunes-EMI deal. No way, said Jobs:

Video is pretty different from music right now because the video industry does not distribute 90 percent of their content DRM free. Never has. So I think they are in a pretty different situation, and I wouldn't hold it to a parallel at all.

It's unclear from the quote whether Jobs is opposed on principle, or if he just has a realistic assessment of the movie and television industry's paranoia about copying, which is even more feverish than the music industry's. Witness last week's NBC-News Corp. announcement, where the two media companies announced plans for a video site that, bizarrely, would include both copy protection and the ability for customers to mash up videos.

Dylan Tweney is a senior editor at Wired.com and publisher of tinywords, the world's smallest magazine. ... Read More

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