Real CEO: Allowing FairPlay a 'Mistake'

RealNetworks' CEO Rob Glaser told the British newspaper the Guardian in an interview Thursday that the music industry erred in allowing Apple to create devices that used a closed digital rights management system that is exclusive to the iPod, called FairPlay.

Glaser's comments came as part of a bigger interview in which he talked about the state of Real's music business as well as the industry in general. The company has butted heads with Apple in the past, most recently through its Harmony project.

He also said that Apple's dominance in the industry was more out of a failure of other companies to produce compelling devices. Glaser said that he did believe that this was not a long-term phenomenon and that such devices would be on the way.

He also hinted that Real itself might be looking towards producing Real-branded devices, however if anything, these devices would not appear until 2007 at the earliest. Additional, Glaser said Real's business model is different from Apple in that the track purchase business is not a primary business for them.

"Apple is using the iPod as a pull for track sales and for Mac sales," he explained. Furthermore, he said the closed DRM business model that the Cupertino company is using may actually be contributing to the problem of piracy.

"The average number of songs sold for the iPod is 25," Glaser told the Guardian. "About half the music on iPods is music obtained illegitimately either from an illegal peer-to-peer networks or from ripping friends' CDs, which is illegal."

Stealing is the only option for most iPod users to get portable and non-copy protected music, he argued. "Apple has gotten away with this approach to a greater degree than we thought they would."