Not Even Jobs Can Stop Us

The scary morning action reversed nicely into the afternoon, and the markets finished at their highest levels since the open, which in my book means the bulls get to take the crown home tonight. This pointless churning in the market is enough to drive a trader/investor crazy. Except for rare names like Sirf Technology (SIRF - commentary - Cramer's Take), which really rallied strongly after its report and has continued to climb, there's little tradeable out there right now. I've been saying for a few days now that I expect to see a 5% move in the broader markets commence any day now. Any day now. Any day now. Sigh.

There's a long letter out from Steve Jobs about digital rights management and how Apple (AAPL - commentary - Cramer's Take) plans to deal with it going forward. I do believe he's firing the first shot across the bow in calling for a total elimination of DRM and proprietary standards for music on the Net. Steve's dead right in calling for this, and the main reason he's finally bringing this up after three years of unfairly locking in iTunes customers is because the independent label consortium finally capitulated to MySpace.com in January, and unprotected MP3s are now legally available for downloading. The dam's been broken, and there's no going back now. At least some of the labels are finally going to rightfully profit on those unprotected songs.

In fact, as I wrote in this weekend's FT:

Want to listen to music you purchased from Apple on another MP3 player? Sorry, Apple and the music labels think it is more important to empower themselves than the end user. And people wonder why music sales are down double digits over the past few years. Hey, labels, wake up and start monetising peer-to-peer and all other forms of open music distribution.

Sure enough -- though it took a full decade after MP3 file trading first became mainstream -- the music labels have begun to license the selling of open-standard MP3 songs on MySpace.com and elsewhere on the Internet.

Anybody want to bet that we see music sales climb in 2007? It turns out people will pay for a good product delivered to them simply and in a form they can use on any system.

Any company that succumbs to the pressures of anybody but the end user is going to fail. Think about it this way: How about all those hundreds of thousands of people who had uploaded content from Viacom (VIA - commentary - Cramer's Take) to their accounts on YouTube? They've suddenly lost hours upon hours of their work. All because YouTube and Google (GOOG - commentary - Cramer's Take) think it's more important to protect the interests of their cronies rather than the interests of their end-users and fans.

That's not going to fly, and I invite any of those users to come upload that content onto BoomRevolution.com, where we will never give into the corporate attorneys' and cronies' demands for removing such content. The Internet Revolution belongs to the end user -- you! -- not anybody else, including those suits who are trying dictate their terms to us otherwise.

As I trademarked here on RealMoney.com several years ago -- "They can't stop the Revolution." And, indeed, they can't. Not even Steve Jobs.

Cisco's (CSCO - commentary - Cramer's Take) call is going very well after the strong numbers. See you tomorrow.

At the time of publication, the firm in which Willard is a partner was net long Sirf Technology, Apple, Google and Cisco although positions can change at any time and without notice.

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At the time of publication, the firm in which Willard is a partner was net long Sirf Technology, Apple, Google and Cisco although positions can change at any time and without notice.

Cody Willard is the manager of CL Willard Capital Management, LLC. He is a regular guest on Fox News, CNBC and other networks, and he writes a monthly column for the Financial Times. He is also an adjunct professor at Seton Hall University and the author of TheCodyReport.net, a monthly stock market newsletter. Willard appreciates your feedback -- click here to send him an email.