“Apple and several major music companies are facing a European Commission antitrust probe after Brussels issued formal charges alleging that the deals that underpin the sale of music through the hugely popular iTunes platform violate competition rules,” Tobias Buck and Karl de Meyer report for The FInancial Times.
“In a surprise development, the Brussels regulator last week sent a confidential statement of objections outlining the accusations to Apple and to “major record companies”. These are understood to include Universal, Warner, EMI and Sony BMG,” Buck and de Meyer report.
Buck and de Meyer report, “The Commission’s main concern is that iTunes’ current set-up in the European market prohibits users in one country from downloading music from a website intended to serve another country.”
“‘Apple has always wanted to operate a single, pan-European iTunes store, accessible by anyone from any member state,’ an Apple spokesman said on Monday. ‘But we were advised by the music labels and publishers that there were certain legal limits to the rights they could grant us. We do not believe the company did anything to violate EU law, and we will continue to work with the EU to resolve this matter,’ he said,” Buck and de Meyer report.
Full article here.
You give them the stars, they ask for the moon.
This sounds like a music labels’ licensing morass (old country-by-country contracts that aren’t EU-applicable), not an issue caused by Apple.
Related articles:
Apple’s DRM-free iTunes play trumps Microsoft’s huge bet on DRM – April 02, 2007
Norwegian Consumer Council senior advisor applauds Apple’s iTunes Store DRM-free music – April 02, 2007
CNBC video: Apple CEO Steve Jobs and EMI Group CEO Eric Nicoli – April 02, 2007
EMI’s Nicoli on DRM-free iTunes: ‘We have to trust our consumers,’ Apple’s Jobs: ‘right thing to do’ – April 02, 2007
Kudos to Steve Jobs and Apple for having courage to call for end of DRM and making it happen – April 02, 2007
Analyst Gartenberg: iTunes Store’s DRM-free music ‘a great win for Apple’ – April 02, 2007
Apple CEO Steve Jobs to appear live on CNBC within the hour – April 02, 2007
Apple: Higher quality 256 kbps AAC DRM-free music on iTunes Store coming in May – April 02, 2007
EMI rejects Warner Music buyout bid – March 04, 2007
EMI halts talks about selling DRM-free music – February 26, 2007
Warner Music approaches EMI in possible takeover bid – February 20, 2007
Macrovision posts pro-DRM open letter to Steve Jobs and digital entertainment industry – February 16, 2007
Warner’s DRM-loving Middlebronfman warns wireless industry it may lose music market to Apple iPhone – February 14, 2007
Monster Cable announces full support of Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ call for DRM-free music – February 13, 2007
BBC columnist doesn’t believe Steve Jobs’ Apple would stop using DRM if music labels would allow it – February 12, 2007
EMI may sell entire music catalog DRM-free – February 09, 2007
Recording Industry Association of America wants their DRM, calls for Apple to license FairPlay – February 08, 2007
Warner’s Middlebronfman: Jobs’ DRM-free music call ‘without logic and merit, we’ll not abandon DRM’ – February 08, 2007
Technology Review editor gets a lot wrong in his article about Apple CEO Jobs’ push to end DRM – February 07, 2007
Apple’s Jobs jolts music industry; Zune exec calls Jobs’ call for DRM-free music ‘irresponsible’ – February 07, 2007
Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ posts rare open letter: ‘Thoughts on Music’ – calls for DRM-free music – February 06, 2007
“You may not like it, but to the French, the Germans, the Dutch, the English, even the Belgians – America is only barely a member of the brotherhood of civilised nations. Perhaps in another 1,000 years… ”
Who gives a flying f*ck what the Germans (Nazis), Dutch (wood shoe-wind mill trolls), Lymies-crooked toothed brits, or Belgian waffles think besides themselves. I can guarantee you that no true American could care less. You people are so far gone you know what hits you when it comes around again. And hopefull the US sits back and remembers everything you’ve said and done to it and doesn’t lift a finger to help you trolls.
@Ricardo
Commie? Who is a commie these days? Even McCarthy is dead mate! No-one believes in communism. Thats a very tired old cliche… Just because I am not a fan of american foreign policy (well, thats stretching it really – “policy” implies someone thought about what might happen when the USA barged into the middle east on a pretext) does not mean I believe in Marxism or any other flavour of communism…
Nice try – if you are a 3rd grader. But it won’t wash.
No. Anti-Americanism, where it exists, is more likely based on the impact of American foreign policy rather than differences in social idealogy.
And the problem in Iraq are because you are the nice guys? Tell that to the millions of Iraqi families who have fled to neighbouring countries. And to the mothers who have lost husbands and sons both in Iraq and over there in the USA…
@Towertone
You need to get out more…
@Ricardo
Further…
What are you saying? That 50 years ago America would have been “politically incorrect” and solved the problem by wiping out the civilians?
What a nice guy you are…
SS
I put 450 miles on my JEEP yesterday. I believe I will stay at my desk today.
And again, you are showing your comic book education of America off with your McCarthy analogies.
Also, I believe Churchill was at Yalta.
World War II?
Is that the other war where the Americans turned up late, having sat on their hands making money from both sides for several years whilst the British, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders died by the truckload?
Still, at least when the communist menace of Grenada had to confronted you were there like a shot.
@@SydneyStephen
“I can guarantee you that no true American could care less.”
Well, perhaps you have hit the nail on the head. Perhaps that is why Americans are so unpopular – perhaps too many of you just don’t care about anyone else…
“You people are so far gone you know what hits you when it comes around again.”
You people? Are you dismissing all of Europe in one go? And just where do you think the boundaries of Europe extend to?
Matey, last time I looked, Sydney wasn’t very close to Europe…
But then you teach a different sort of science over there – so perhaps you teach a different sort of geography? The two-colour map kind of geography – “US” and “THEM”. Popular in the State Department I should imagine…
Now if there are any educated reasonable americans reading these posts and you are offended by this, ask yourselves were you offended by the anti-EU nonsense trotted out here today… You ought to be. No country is an island – and the USA will not be the world’s only super-power for much longer. I know many travelled and educated Americans who would agree with me that US foreign policy is the reason America is viewed so poorly in the world today.
I wouldn’t have thought many (if any) of the people submitting commentary on here are likely to be children. Yet so many people are actually proud to display their utter ignorance of the world…
Its time America put your house in order. Start teaching your children again. Start reading newspapers and listening to the news. Grow up a bit and be responsible world citizens instead of behaving like overgrown (and definitely overfed) teenagers.
And get rid of those turkeys in the white house…
We’re all in this together people… More so now than at any other time in history. And if you don’t know where Europe is, or where Australia isn’t, then for God’s sake go find a bloody atlas…
TowerTone
It’s true that Churchill was at Yalta, however he was largely marginalised during the talks by Roosevelt partially because FDR’s health was failing and he couldn’t face the fight that Churchill expected with Stalin and also because Roosevelt’s foreign policy objective was to cut British and French power in Europe after the war.
In keeping with much of US foreign policy, this was a complete disaster.
Go read some history books by people who were there, you might find it an education.
Why is this so hard to see? If you let some guy in France buy a tune from lets say the iTunes store in England – he ain’t gonna like it cause it will have that silly Brittish accent!
common people, get a clue! I say until they have an official recognizable easy to understand EU accent, no iTunes store for you!
On behalf of SydneyStephen, let me explain for the more intellectually challenged…
An atlas is a big book with maps in it. Maps are like drawings of countries, with rivers and everything done in nice pretty colours.
An atlas is very useful if you’re planning a journey or you just want to know where places are in the world. The world is a big round ball of rock that goes round the Sun (the bright orange ball in the sky) roughly every 365 days and six hours. Contrary to popular opinion (in the USA anyway), the big shiny thing in the sky was created several billion years ago.
An atlas will also tell you other things like how hot places can be and how much precipitation they get each year.
@Towertone.
When I said you need to get out more, driving to your local burger joint is not what I had in mind…
And, yes, Churchill was there. But he didn’t want to be there with Stalin already controlling so much of Europe. Roosevelt didn’t see what Churchill saw… the threat Stalinist Communist Russia was to become.
The iron curtain went up soon after…
This quote nicely sums up Churchill’s view of American foreign policy at the time: “Churchill knew that Roosevelt did not like the British Empire and, from Churchill’s point of view, did not understand it. He once wrote Churchill a long letter about India, using as an example the American colonies. Why, he said, do you not do what we did when we had our revolution? Churchill is not able to answer this letter; he thinks it’s so vastly ignorant of the situation in India that he doesn’t know what to say about it.”
Imagine what he would have thought of George Bush?
The quote is from the Churchill Centre – google it…
H-P
I believe part of that perspective YOU may want to check into is that America was having to consider a costly war of souls with the Japs, and that we wanted Russia to have NO PART in that.
Also, France was to relenquish its hold on Vietnam in return for their fight against the Japanese. And they, through Truman, went back on this agreemant, causing Ho Chi Minh to turn to *guess who* for aid to rid his country of occupiers.
And could you explain to me the failure of the Marshall Plan? NATO?
Much of our forign policy is directed mainly to help other countries. Is this the part you speak of?
What nationality are you, and what foreign policy do y’all have to help in matters?
These threads are always so amusing. It gives me such a great feeling of intellectual superiority watching these American right wing neanderthals express their ignorance about Europe (and the world in general). Kinda like when I pull out my MacBook in a room filled with Windows-sufferers.
Get the skinny here: http://www.thomas-fitzgerald.net/2007/04/03/eu-probe-into-itunes-seperating-fact-from-hysteria/.
Thomas explains clearly what is going on.
The short answer – It’s the labels, not Apple.
The music labels are to blame here no one else, especially Apple. It would be an easy case for Apple to prove that the music labels forced there hand to setup the stores in a certain way. Anyone can purchase and download songs from iTunes more so than any other online store which restricts users who only can access there stores using IE 6 or 7 which means the whole Mac market is cut out. That is more of a violation than anything Apple has ever done period.
The stupidity in europe is amazing lately.
Captain Europe
You sound more like Sergeant Schultz.
As a Canadian, I can’t help but laugh at the average American’s reaction to a newly united Europe.
In Canada we just had a ground breaking free trade pact between two provinces, Alberta and British Columbia.
That’s right, there is now free trade of goods, services and labour between 2 of the 10 Canadian provinces. No more ‘fees’ facing out-of-province workers. No more ‘import fees’ on out-of-province goods and services.
All such ‘fees’ were unconstitutional, but that never stopped the various provinces from collecting them.
Anyone can purchase and download songs from iTunes more so than any other online store which restricts users who only can access there stores using IE 6 or 7 which means the whole Mac market is cut out. That is more of a violation than anything Apple has ever done period.
Sure – and the Commission knows and acknowledges that.
The stupidity in europe is amazing lately.
You started out so well… and yet you fell so deep…
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Tower Tone: no, Sergeant Schultz vould speek like zees.
Did I mention the wet dream of the seat-farting euro burocrats coming true shortly?
I should feel pitty for the all those pathetic people living in this gulag of buracrazy…. NOT!!!
… buracrazy… ha get it?
I should feel pitty for the all those pathetic people living in this gulag of buracrazy…. NOT!!!
And you’re aware that you’re defending the myopic music distributors against Apple and the european consumers?
No, probably not. Pity.
Some people just don’t get it.
Towertone…
Let me get this straight – you’re digging back to 1947 to find an American foreign policy success (developed by a Democrat administration and progressively opposed by Republicans) as an example of the deft hand of US foreign policy.
That’s a joke, right.
Marshall was necessary to everyone: without it, Europe would probably have been even slower to recover from the nightmare of WWII – a nightmare which would have been less severe had the earlier policy of isolationism not excluded the US from joining the fight against fascism until the turn of 1942.
If you want to see how cack-handed and clumsy US foreign policy can be, look at Iraq now: Bremer’s plan appears to have been to apply some of the principles of the Marshall Plan in order to facilitate the rise of a democracy based on free-market principles. The only difference is that, instead of waiting for a civil uprising to create the opportunity for that plan, the hawks of this administration decided to bomb Iraq back into the Stone Age whilst simultaneously destroying its governmental structures so that it would have no choice other than change.
That’s not diplomacy or persuasion; that’s inhumane vandalism that has done nothing other than enrich those who have picked over the ruins of Iraq. And please don’t try and justify it by using the “isn’t the world a better place without Saddam” straw-man argument.
Civilised sovereign countries don’t invade other sovereign countries to achieve regime change, and they don’t falsify intelligence to create a casus belli so that there is thin veneer of justification.
Do you want other examples? Threatening to invade Saudi Arabia in 1973; the support of numerous repressive and corrupt tin-pot dicators like Pinochet, Somoza, Duvalier, Marcos just to name a few; the bankrolling of the Mujahaddin in Afghanistan – that’s a long-term strategy that’s paid off.
Please feel free to provide any examples of foreign policy developed by Republican administrations during the last 30 years that haven’t resulted in chaos in the long-term. Surely that’s a wide enough target.
Ping,
If you’re not careful, you’ll cause MacGuy’s “anti-rational” programming to go into overdrive and then there’ll be hell to pay.
He’s probably a relatively simple organism who can’t assess a situation unless someone tells him how he should think: in this case, someone has seemingly attacked Apple and he/she/it has to respond in the only way they know how.
It’s like a monkey throwing faeces around, but less endearing.
H-P
‘Civilised sovereign countries don’t invade other sovereign countries to achieve regime change, and they don’t falsify intelligence to create a casus belli so that there is thin veneer of justification.
‘
That’s right. They don’t. Seeing your perspective on this one event shows your prejudice toward the facts. Why bother? ANY event can be looked at through a prism of your own ideology, and see only it’s failures.
Again, your nationality?
H-P
http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/node/3913
Funny, these are not all Democrats.
http://www.state.gov/www/policy.html
A few things we do.
H-P, your statement is so sweeping and vast in it’s incorrectnes you would need to rewrite world history since WWII to NOT see the positive effects of our policies. Are they 100% perfect? NO.
I named NATO and the Marshall Plan simply because they were the first 2 that came to mind after 1945.
Disagree with some of whet we do, fine. Blanket us as completely wrong, and you may need to have a friend help you pull your head out, as deep as it must be.