Apple versus Apple
p2p news / p2pnet: This coming Wednesday, what’s left of The Beatles, “risk the wrath of an even more extreme fundamentalist religious group, the devoted followers of the great prophet L. Ron Jobs, as Apple Corps goes to the High Court in London seeking multimillion-pound damages against entertainment company Apple Computer over its iTunes music store”.
Thus speaketh The Enquirer on the latest round of the battle between Apple and Apple, with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr in one corner, and L. Ron Jobs in the other.
Although EMI is in charge of what happens to music from the former Fab Four, Apple Corps, owned by the former Beatles and their heirs, “still owns the licensing rights to Beatles’ products,” as the Times Online says, and Apple is:
“Claiming that the introduction of iTunes broke a $26 million settlement under which Apple Computer agreed to steer clear of the music business, for which the Beatles’ company retains the famous trademark. It is the latest clash in one of Britain’s longest-running corporate legal battles.
“Any damages for this latest clash could amount to tens of millions of pounds because it concerns Apple Computer’s hugely successful iTunes Music Store and iPod digital music players.”
But, “a little perspective may be in order,” writes Dan Fost in the San Francisco Chronicle.
“Jobs and Apple are still paying the price for losing a fateful battle with Microsoft in the 1980s. It was fought in court and in the marketplace, and at the end, Apple was left with an insignificant share of the very market one could argue it had invented, personal computers.”
And, ” In a way, Apple’s survival is remarkable,” Fost has Leander Kahney, managing editor of Wired News and author of two books about Apple, including The Cult of Mac, saying, “like a dinosaur living beyond the Ice Age”.
Now Apple’s worldwide market share “hovers at a little more than 2 percent,” and in addition, Fost-through-Kahney points out, “the music industry hasn’t exactly been turned over to iPods. Roughly 95 percent of all music sold is still on a compact disc, and illegal downloads still outnumber Apple’s legal music sales online.”
‘Swamps’ would be more accurate than ‘outnumbers’ because the flood of online music flows almost entirely from the indie sites and p2p networks, rather than from the pale and watery iTunes which more or less represents the entire corporate effort.
However, that’s OK with Jobs because iTunes isn’t a music download service in the first place. It’s an iPod marketing tool.
Meanwhile, Apple is a, “big American corporation, cutthroat,” Fost quotes Kahney as saying. “The reality doesn’t fit with the image. Jobs is the only cool guy there.”
And as The Inquirer sums it up, “One of the first musical sounds made by an Apple computer was called Sosumi – pronounced ’so sue me’.”
Also See:
The Enquirer -Beatles “bigger than Steve Jobs”, March 27, 2006
in charge – Apple # 1 sues EMI , December 16, 2005
Times Online – Beatles take rival Apple to court over core business, March 27, 2006
San Francisco Chronicle – Stubborn Apple at risk of making the same mistake twice, March 26, 2006
