Apple Calls French Bill Rotten
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Written By Reprise Media | March 22, 2006 | Share This
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Yesterday the lower house of the French parliament passed a bill that has Apple angry to the core. If enacted by the French Seante in May, the law would force dealers of music protected by digital rights management (DRM) to make their wares playable on any maker’s portable device. Apple apparently sees this as a threat to their market-leading iTunes service, which only carries music that will play exclusively on the company’s iPods - according to Reuters, Apple called the bill a prelude to “state-sponsored piracy.”
While not exactly carrying a sign reading ‘The End Is Nigh,’ Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris spelt doom and gloom for clean downloading, saying, “If this happens, legal music sales will plummet just when legitimate alternatives to piracy are winning over customers.” She’s not necessarily talking about Apple’s sales - France accounts for just 2-5 percent of worldwide iTunes revenues. Kerris also said that the law could help Apple at the expense of copyright owners: “iPod sales will likely increase as users freely load their iPods with ‘interoperable’ music which cannot be adequately protected.”
Joe at Techdirt points out that it’s silly to assert that “making legal sales more flexible will encourage illegal file trading.” With that in mind, Eric Bangeman of Ars Technica provides some cogent analysis of Apple’s reasoning here:
“Apple’s argument appears to be that if companies are forced to reveal how their DRM functions, it is only a matter of time until the tools that “swap” one form of DRM for another…become widely available to the public. Any such tool would have to strip the FairPlay encoding from an Apple-DRMed AAC file, transcode it to WMA, and add new DRM.”
Rather than deal with such a complicated production, goes the argument, users would flee to file-sharing networks to steal music. But a simpler and likelier outcome, says Bangeman, is that each portable music player would receive a firmware update that would allow it to play tracks protected by any DRM - leaving individual users blissfully out of the process altogether. In any case, it’s unclear what Apple will do if the law passes, but observers see two choices: shut down the local iTunes service or surrender to France.
Topics: Technology |