Happy Birthday, iPod

Today marks the 5-year anniversary of the iPod. Matt Yglesias has some spot-on comments about the DMCA’s role in Apple’s success.

In particular, if you went out and bought an iPod, and then you wanted to legally acquire some music for it, the only place you could turn was the iTunes Music Store. And, once you’d built up a library of songs purchased through the iTunes Music Store, the only place you can play the songs is . . . on an iPod. So if when your iPod’s battery dies, you think to yourself “fuck this, I’m going to buy a different company’s player,” well, doing that will require you to re-buy all your music. So you buy another iPod, and you buy more music and you’re further and further locked-in. Even better, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes it illegal for a rival firm to construct a player capable of playing legally owned iTunes Music Store files. This is a great deal for Apple who, in virtue of being first, gets to entrench its advantage deeper-and-deeper but it’s not very smart legislation.

Obviously, I agree with his sentiment concerning lock-in effects. However, I think it’s important to keep in mind that there’s little evidence that the iTunes Store drove the iPod’s success, rather than the other way around. The iPod was unveiled in October 2001, while the iTunes Store didn’t launch until April 2003. Clearly, the hundreds of thousands of people who bought the first two generations of iPods weren’t doing so in order to play music purchased on the iTunes store.

And to this day, most of the music on peoples’ iPods is not from the iTunes store. Some of it is pirated, of course, but a lot of it (including almost all of mine) comes from peoples’ existing music collections on CDs.

Peoples’ existing CD libraries served as the foundation for the iPod revolution. Both the MP3 players that preceded it, and the iPod itself, were initially sold as a more convenient way to play your CD collection. Had the law prevented consumers from ripping their existing CDs, Steve Jobs would have faced a nasty chicken-and-egg problem: who is going to buy an iPod that can’t play any of their existing music? And who’s going to buy music from the iTunes Store if they don’t already own an iPod.

Come to think of it, this situation perfectly describes the current video-download market. There’s not much of a market for “video jukebox” hardware or software, or portable video devices, because such devices can’t play peoples’ existing home movie libraries. The lack of such devices, in turn, makes people less likely to be interested in purchasing movies online that will only be playable on their computer screens.

It’s worth wondering what the digital video marketplace would look like today if the DMCA weren’t on the books. I would bet money that we’d now have a thriving market in hardware and software based on an open video standard, just as we had a thriving market in MP3-based hardware and software between 1998 and 2003. Instead, we have to twiddle our thumbs while Hollywood lurches from one comically bad movie download service to another.

In short, the iPod succeeded despite, not because of, DRM technology. And it seems to me that the use of DRM on DVDs (reinforced by the DMCA) has been largely responsible for the stagnation of home video technology.

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