Steve Jobs: The Rolling Stone Interview
Do you see any parallel between the music revolution today and the PC revolution in 1984?
Obviously, the biggest difference is that this time we're on Windows. Other than that, I'm not so sure. It's still very early in the music revolution. Remember, there are 10 billion songs that are distributed in the U.S. every year - legally - on CDs. So far on iTunes, we've distributed about 16 million [as of October]. So we're at the very beginning of this. [...]
David Bowie predicted that, because of the Internet and piracy, copyright is going to be dead in ten years. Do you agree?
No. If copyright dies, if patents die, if the protection of intellectual property is eroded, then people will stop investing. That hurts everyone. People need to have the incentive so that if they invest and succeed, they can make a fair profit. But on another level entirely, it's just wrong to steal. Or let's put it this way: It is corrosive to one's character to steal. We want to provide a legal alternative.
