“New legislation in France would force Apple Computer to open the iPod and iTunes to competitors — and that’s a good thing for consumers, in the long run,” Leander Kahney writes for Wired News. “On Tuesday, the French parliament passed a law that would require digital content bought at any online store to be playable on any hardware. The law would be applicable to all hardware and service providers, but the immediate impact would be on Apple and iTunes, and may prompt the company to withdraw from France.”
“To many, France’s move seems patently unfair to Apple,” Kahney writes. “The company created the market for legal music downloads, why shouldn’t it dominate it? Why should the French government help competitors like Microsoft or Sony to get a foothold in a market they have proven incapable of competing in? And why should Apple be subject to antimonopoly legislation when rivals like Microsoft traditionally have not? To free marketers, it’s government meddling at its worst.”
“But French legislators aren’t just looking at Apple,” Kahney writes. “They’re looking ahead to a time when most entertainment is online, a shift with profound consequences for consumers and culture in general. French lawmakers want to protect the consumer from one or two companies holding the keys to all of its culture, just as Microsoft holds the keys to today’s desktop computers… Apple may not qualify as a literal monopoly — there are lots of ways to get music and buying online accounts for only a small fraction of total music sales. But the sliver it does control it controls almost completely, and it’s not out of the question to suggest that this sliver will ultimately become the only way people will buy music in the future.”
Full article here.
In the United States, at least, it is not illegal to build and have a monopoly; it’s illegal to abuse a monopoly. Ask Microsoft about that concept.
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Related articles:
Will Apple’s Steve Jobs bid France adieu? – March 22, 2006
Apple calls proposed French DRM law ‘state-sponsored piracy,’ predicts iPod sales increase – March 21, 2006
French National Assembly approves digital copyright bill; could affect Apple’s FairPlay DRM – March 21, 2006
Will this law automatically force Microsoft to make PlayForSure work on Macs?
This guy is just a complete Mac hater. He is a tool of MS and has unabashedly dissed Steve Jobs and Apple many times – all the while hiding behind the “Cult of Mac” section of Wired.
He’s gone crazy.
— ndb
the word “Monopoly” has TURNED into the word “Majority” to many people…
75% control of a market is NOT a Monopoly! 95% control of a market, now that’s a monopoly!
Plus, who the hell do the French think they are to decide that music purchased in one format shoudl be freely converted to another? If I buy a movie on VHS, does the studio owe me a DVD copy? Why not?
And who said you have to own an iPod to play iTunes?
iTunes can be played on iPods and Motorola phones as well as any computer running OS X or Windows XP.
The French really ought to just giveup on this one, it’s what they do best anyway.
leander loves to make money off mac and ipod fans, the culture, etc. with his books, but ends up bashing Apple all the time… what a tool… and not the brightest one in the shed…
Surely if this is to allow downloaded content to be accessible on ANY hardware then all the other stores will need to bring out a Mac version?
Monopoly = Bad
A monopoly is a monopoly is a monopoly. You didn’t like it when Microsoft got there’s and said so, so why are all you maczealots defending Apple’s right to have their very own monopoly? What is it?: Now we get to be assh*les too?
btw, didn’t you know that 74 per cent is the threshold to officially be considered a monopoly.
Anyways, If I buy a music CD I can play it anywhere and it should be that way with online music. And 128kb is sub standard for quality.
The death of subscription services. The obvious answer to this law is to start selling without DRM. If Apple does this, they’d have to sell MP3s not AAC since everyone has been avoiding AAC so they could call Apple proprietary. Now assuming other music sellers have to use the common standard of MP3, either they pay music comps “subscription” price and screw them over, or they force all downloads to be purchase only and end all subscriptions. I suspect the music biz will allow the 1st option as long as Apple is still #1, then complain about lost profits later.
Having a choice of store to buy music from for an iPod sounds like a good move to me. Competition is good. Apple didnt get where it is by not competing. It needs to continue to compete to stay there not create lockins
I also wanna know about the PlaysForSure on Macs – will it be forthcoming? And how are rental services going to continue if this law comes to our side of the English Channel?
http://www.nikfletcher.com
“Apple initially balked at copy protection, but as the iPod and iTunes took off, the company realized FairPlay had an important secondary function: It locked iPod users into the online iTunes Music Store, and iTunes music buyers into the iPod.”
Absolutely false! You don’t need any iPod when you buy music at the ITMS; and the music bought at the ITMS can be played everywhere! Convert it on mp3…
I am curious to see what will do Microsoft! They will have to open their PlayForSure!
OK, I want Halo for Playstation.
Force Microsoft to make all Xbox exclusive games available to Playstation.
According to this idiotic plan, that seems reasonable.
“OK, I want Halo for Playstation.
Force Microsoft to make all Xbox exclusive games available to Playstation.”
Actually, that would nice. It would be nice to pick up a game and be able to play it on different consoles where the consumer can decide which company makes the best or fastest console. Of course, that could never happen because the different consoles have different architectures that require the games to be programmed differently.
However, that is NOT the case with music, or at least, it shouldn’t be that way. Although, that is the direction that Apple is going. They are creating a world where you need to repurchase the music or jump through hoops to convert it just so that you can legally listen to it on another device. Is that really what you people want? Do you really want to HAVE to purchase all Apple products just to listen to music or watch videos? They may not be there yet, but that’s the direction they are headed.
Everyone forgets.
Who is holding the gun to your head making you buy from iTunes?
Don’t like it, go buy the CD.
Then you can use the music on any player. It’s that simple.
RDDV:
You are wrong. Protected files (music bought from iTunes store) cannot be converted to other formats.
You can play it anywhere on mac/pc as long as you have iTunes. Or any iPod device that can decrypt the DRM on iTunes store bought music.
No one has a license to decrypt Apple AAC FairPlay DRM on any portable music device.
Think,
Your logic shows that you are deliberately not thinking ahead a few years. Things are nice right now while we still have a choice. However, they are trying to take that choice away, and you’re supporting it. You know, no one’s holding a gun to your head to make you blindly follow and support Apple.
uh…. I think you’re wrong there brutha….
I burned a CD of Joss Stone music I bought from ITMS, imported it back into itunes as mp3, and then saved them on a cd as data. I then took them to another computer and loaded them. There was now no drm… and the file was converted from aac to mp3.
This would allow you to take it to ANY mp3 player out there. Not just one that has access to Apple’s fairplay drm.
How long have you owned an apple btw?
Someone said “Plus, who the hell do the French think they are to decide that music purchased in one format shoudl be freely converted to another? If I buy a movie on VHS, does the studio owe me a DVD copy? Why not?”
No they don’t, but you can play a VHS in many people’s video tape players. If you wanted you could start a VCR company. Whereas here, apple does not allow competitors to use their DRM.
I think this law is good; it may in the end be a good thing for apple, as people who only like iTunes or only like iPod can use that with the player or software of their choice. ie, if I was a big iRiver fan, I could still play my iTMS music at TOP QUALITY (reimporting causes great quality loss).
MDN said it best. It is illegal to ABUSE a monopoly. Microsoft was CONVICTED of ABUSING their monopoly position. Last I checked, it was the music labels that were being investigated by the DOJ for COLLUSION and PRICE-FIXING, not Apple. Apple has actually kept the price of digital music downloads at $0.99 when the labels wanted to increase them. Do you want to pay ringtone prices for your music?
Here’s a nice loophole that complies with the letter of the law. It would be a win for Apple, the French government, a toss-up for non-iPod users and a deterrent to casual downloading.
Just as Apple includes a burn-to-CD option for protected AAC, they could include an option to export directly to WAV or AIFF. The file would then be in a standard non-DRM format that any portable digital audio player that follows industry standards can play. Of coures the file would be 10x larger, but this complies with the law. If a person then wanted to convert the file to lossy format like WMA, ATRAC or MP3, then it would their decision. The larger WAV/AIFF files would discourage casual downloading. Also, if people decided to convert the WAV/AIFF files to a lossy format, the audio degradation would serve as another deterrent to downloading.
They just want to get together with Apple and establish a “standard” DRM… can you guess which DRM 99% of the stores are going to push on Apple? So everyone leeches on the iPod for free, and apple has to add PlaysForSure to get what exactly from the others?
The French. Seriously, they have no clue on anything.
Ummm, for the morons lambasting Leander; can you point out at what point in the article he is actually bashing Apple?
Did you people ever get out of the 3rd grade, if you had stuck around you might have mastered t art of reading comprehension.
lowfatsourcecreme: If you burn your AAC file to an aiff CD and then re-import it as an MP3 at a higher rate like 192 kbps the loss in quality isn’t that noticible. If that loss in quality is noticible to you then there’s a good chance you wouldn’t be buying from iTunes anyway because you can hear the difference between a CD and a 128 kbps AAC file.
The whole MP3 revolution came on the heels of terrible sounding 128kbps files. I really don’t think pristine sound quality is the issue. You can play your iTMS store music on any device you want by doing a simple CD back-up (which is a good idea anyway).
That said, if the law does go through then it better go both ways. If iTMS songs have to be able to play on any device then WMAs have to be able to play on any device…Windows or Mac…mind you MS could say they made their WMA files available for Macs and no one would know, cos really, what Mac user is going to want to put that crap on their iPod?