Feb

8

Apple’s Ulterior Motive for Unlocking DRM?

February 8, 2007 |

Brent Schlender of Fortune magazine thinks so. He argues that Steve Jobs unusual move to publicly bash the music industry is so that he can re-negotiate Apple’s deals with them and get them to agree to let consumers download music on the iPhone directly.

Could Jobs’ eloquent plea on behalf of consumers all be a gambit to
force Apple’s content suppliers to renegotiate their deals and make it
possible to download music and video directly onto the iPhone? After
all, the iPhone certainly has the wireless capability and the processor
smarts to handle such a simple online transaction. And Apple has the
iTunes Music Store ready to do business.

I don’t buy that (neither does the crowd on Digg). Even the dumbest  heads in the record industry will agree to wireless downloading if there is a market for it and the DRM protection remains intact. I am not even sure Apple is interested in this beyond wireless syncing with the iPhone. Though a store on the phone would be interesting, it seems Apple is mostly interested in working on a home-server/hub strategy of which the phone is an extension, but not the central focus.

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