Steve Jobs is Right, Steve Jobs is Wrong

There is a great interview with Steve Jobs at Rolling Stone
here about the music industry.

Steve recognizes the problem. It is the issue of capital and credit required to get a new artist off the ground. And he is right, the winners pay for the losers. What he doesn’t realize is that the system of winners is what is creating the losers. As a billionaire, he doesn’t see the system as the problem per se. He accepts the fact of competition in the marketplace as a necessary prequisite, in spite of the fact that his success with iTunes is a result of cooperation in the marketplace.

The problems we face today all revolve around the issue of capital and credit.

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.

This is the blindspot. What he is really saying is that it is corrosive to one’s character to share. This was the mistake that started 200 plus years ago when we set up the copyright and patent systems. This was the same error in thinking that led the financier of the American Revolution (Robert Morris) to end up in debtors prison.

I will have lots more to say on the issue of capital and credit, but for now, I just wanted to make you aware of the interview.