The Wall Street Journal says Jobs is joining EMI to announce the company is completely abondoning DRM copy protection, just as Steve Jobs urged in an open letter in February.
Others concur, including:
Guardian’s Online Blog
Image courtesy of Seeking Alpha
Steve Jobs will go onstage at a special EMI press conference in London on Monday, sparking speculation that iTunes will finally sell Beatles songs.
Beatles and iTunes talk growing Steve Jobs launches the iPhone Steve jobs teased fans with a Beatles song at the iPhone launch EMI is to hold a media event on Monday with Apple boss Steve Jobs as special guest, prompting speculation that Beatles songs will finally go online.
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In an invite to media sent out on Sunday, EMI said it was announcing an “exciting new digital offering”.
There will also be a “special live performance” at the London event by an unnamed artist or band.
I guess Steve Jobs is chuckling to himself having fooled everyone today.
At Macworld in January, Jobs suggested Apple might do something special on April 1 – its 30th birthday.
Knowing that announcements of announcements stoke the fires of speculation, Jobs got everyone expecting something special from Apple — but the April Fool’s joke is to do nothing at all.
I know I’ve just spent the last three hours surfing the web for a special surpise announcement, like a new $666 Apple Uno (a kit-built computer), or a lightning “everything must got for one dollar” sale at the local Apple store.
“Ha, ha– fooled you!” Jobs is saying to himself.
Bastard.
Yesterday BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow rightly called out Apple’s hypocritical “state-sponsored piracy” response to France’s new law against vendor lock-in.
One of the big reasons the iPod took off is because of Napster and other file-sharing services. People suddenly had huge collections of digital music on their computers, but no easy way to take it with them when they left the house.
Now it appears Steve Jobs himself once agreed with the thinking behind the French law, which is to protecting consumers’ right to move content they buy from one device to another.
In a 2002 interview with the Wall Street Journal, reprinted in part at Macworld, Jobs said:
“If you legally acquire music, you need to have the right to manage it on all other devices that you own.”
Compare that to what French lawmakers had to say this week:
“The consumer must be able to listen to the music they have bought on no matter what platform,” Martin Rogard, an adviser at the French Culture Ministry, told the Financial Times.
Image courtesy of wpc-fr.net.
(Via SiliconBeat)
The first public screening of Pixar’s Cars was at the ShoWest conference in Las Vegas this week. Directed by Toy Story genius John Lasseter, the film is due this summer.
Writer Joseph L. Kleiman has the first review. He writes:
“Equal parts humor – there’s references to everything from the anti-establishment disobedience of the 1960’s to newer pop culture standards like “The Fast and the Furious” – and tenderness, the packed house openly combined laughter with tears. During a very touching scene about how the Interstate Highway system decimated towns along Route 66, there was barely a dry eye in the house. You heard me right. Looking around, I could see grown men sobbing (though I’m a bit modest to admit to anything myself). The scene was reminiscent and on a par with the scene where Jessie is thrown away in “Toy Story 2.”
Now you can create your very own Steve Jobs keynote, thanks to a soundboard with 50 of the great man’s utterings.
Made by a Japanese website, the soundboard includes gems like:
“But there is one more thing.”
“We think video is the wrong place.”
“Do you have an iPod?”
“It scrolls like butter.”
“We have this rotating Apple sign on the top, which is popular in Tokyo.”
Unfortunately, the site is slow and may be having server problems. It doesn’t appear to be loading the entire soundboard. I get only 6 phrases, including a very tinny and disappointing, “Hi, I’m Steve.”
