Saturday, April 07, 2007

Beginning of the end of music copy protection?

We cover the affect of copyright, which is used to protect music, video and other Internet data. Apple's Steve Jobs has called for dropping copy protection on music, stating that 97% of the songs on a typical iPod music player are already in the open mp3 and AAC formats. The EMI record label has agreed to let Apple sell songs in Apple's AAC format. Microsoft may soon have a similar agreement with EMI.

Presumably Microsoft will distribute the music in the .mp3 format, which, unlike AAC, works with any music player or program. Is this the beginning of the end for copy protection on music? What is the outlook for video?

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