Copy Restriction on EMI Group's ITunes Music May Be Lifted

EMI Group, the world's fourth largest record label, plans to announce today that they have worked a deal with Apple Incorporated's iTunes. The deal will allow users to play and download songs that were previously part of EMI Group's copy protected artists, including such musical groups as the Roling Stones, and other high selling musicians may also be included, such as Coldplay, Gorillaz, and possibly even Janet Jackson.

Unfortunately for Beatles fans, EMI Group is the big label that controls the Beatles' music, but the living band members and the estate of the deceased members have not permitted online sales.

Steve Jobs', the Chief Executive of Apple, Inc., has maintained that copy protection software on Apple's iTunes does little to protect against pirated copies of music available for download at other locations, both legitimate and illegal file transfer sites, and therefore, having copy protection software on songs for iTunes only causes inconvenience to the iTunes customers.

Even so, most big record labels have required online music stores that sell songs with locks to prevent unauthorized copying. If EMI removes this restriction on most of their artists on their label, EMI Group will be the first to remove these copy restrictions.

On February 6th, 2007, Jobs wrote a "Thoughts on Music", which can be found at the following website: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/. Job's notes that online music sales still don't come close to the total of music sales - in fact, online sales account for less than 15% of all music sales.

Since CDs cannot have copy protection added to them to prevent the songs from being shared or downloaded to computers or other playing devices, such as iPods and other MP3 players, Jobs seems to indicate that it is not only unfair to online music stores to require the online stores to use the copy protection software, when the majority of the music in the world floating around on the internet, computers, and other electronic digital music playing devices has no copy protection at all.

Therefore, the conclusion drawn is that the added requirement by the big record labels that online music stores must have copy protection software on their songs, limiting the ability to play the song on any device or any number of devices, does nothing but frustrate the consumer and continues to reduce online music sales potential.

Each of the four major record labels, Sony, Universal, EMI Group, and Warner have all considered lifting the locks on copy protection software, and two of these groups have actually done so on limited releases. Their goal was to track record sales to see if removing the copy protection software from online music store's copies of these songs would reduce the overall sales of the records.

Jobs has said that it is his belief that having the copy protection software required in order to be licensed to sell a label's music online actually costs more money to maintain and keep track of, including increasing the safety, changing the codes required to lock the copy of the music, and therefore, having copy protection software required on music from online stores actually may decrease online music sales more than lifting the restriction.

The press conference is scheduled in London today.

Supporting links and more information:

Apple - Thoughts on Music

LA Times

Guardian