Apple wants more iPod ready cars

“Bob Borchers, who is the senior director of iPod worldwide product marketing, told CNET that Apple is interested in making the use of iPods in cars much easier.”

Who would have thought that MP3 players in cars would take so long to get off the ground? The lawyers, that’s who. As a generalization, before the iPod showed up the term “MP3″ had negative connotations. MP3 was associated with illegal file-sharing, not with audio compression for the mass-market. With the advent of iTunes, the mass-market had a way to get a wide variety of legal MP3s easily online. Apple again helped break down the tenuous relationship of online music and legality. Perhaps, then, they should be the ones to really pursue the automobile market for MP3 audio.

I say this because my first instinct was to chide Apple for shutting the competition out of the car audio market. But it’s a much harder market to get into than one would expect, as illustrated in Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture.

“Your investment [in MP3 audio] buys you not only a company, it also buys you a lawsuit. So extreme has the environment become that even car manufacturers are afraid of technologies that touch content. In an article in Business 2.0, Rafe Needleman describes a discussion with BMW:

“I asked why, with all the storage capacity and computer power in the car, there was no way to play MP3 files. I was told that BMW engineers in Germany had rigged a new vehicle to play MP3s via the car’s built-in sound system, but that the company’s marketing and legal departments weren’t comfortable with pushing this forward for release stateside. Even today, no new cars are sold in the United States with bona fide MP3 players. …” [5]

This is the world of the mafia—filled with “your money or your life” offers, governed in the end not by courts but by the threats that the law empowers copyright holders to exercise. It is a system that will obviously and necessarily stifle new innovation. It is hard enough to start a company. It is impossibly hard if that company is constantly threatened by litigation.”

So maybe a big company like Apple is doing a long-term favor to all of the non-disc based audio innovators. Though Lessig wrote this in 2004, the state of the market has not evolved much. We’ve seen a few manufacturers who have taken legal risks by getting involved. Audio-jacks and FM transmitters are currently the most common way to listen to MP3s in the car. The 2007 Infiniti G35 will come with a hard drive to store audio files on but it is the rare exception to the rule.

If Apple can get its foot in the door with a few car manufacturers, the gates might open for others to claim, “our car is ready for all of your audio devices.” It seems risky, but if anybody has the pull right now it’s Apple. We’ll see.

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