iTunes Music Store — Eine innovative Dienstleistung zur Durchsetzung von Property-Rights im Internet

Music filesharing systems based on peer-to-peer technology are increasingly menacing the entire music industry. After neglecting the issue in the beginning, the major music labels are now struggling to enforce their property rights in the Internet in order to maintain their profits — up to now without substantial impact. The iTunes Music Store, presented by Apple Inc. in April 2003 is the first commercial service able to persuade a considerable number of internet users to pay for digital music they download. This article discusses the major factors which contribute to iTunes’ success and analyses the service from different perspectives. From a technological point of view, the digital rights management systems stand out as they are quite liberal and even include peer-to-peer elements. The business perspective suggests that its success lies in the integration of the music industry’s need for compensation with the customers’ requirements to exchange music files and to write them to CD. Taking a new institutional economics approach, the service pays attention to the fact that in the Internet age some (intellectual) property rights can not be enforced in a way the music industry was used to in pre-Internet times. Leaving some property rights not allocated the remaining property rights can be enforced more efficiently by presenting an innovative and easy-to-use service.