RSSFrance Passes Softened iTunes Bill
By Ed Oswald | Published June 30, 2006, 2:17 PM
A bill that once threatened iTunes' dominance in France was approved by the country's parliament on Friday, albeit in a watered down form. While the initial bill essentially made closed proprietary digital rights management systems illegal, a loophole inserted into a compromise bill softened that requirement.
Although the bill passing through the lower house led some to believe that Apple might pull out of the country to protect its proprietary FairPlay DRM, the French Senate in May amended the bill to say that music stores would be allowed to keep their exclusivity only after receiving the go-ahead from copyright holders and artists.
The two houses later compromised and submitted the combined bill for a revote last week. The law was passed Friday, much to the chagrin of supporters of the stricter bill. Socialists in Parliament threatened legal action to attempt to have the more stringent policy enforced.
The government says it disagrees with the Socialist's argument, saying the bill adequately weighs the rights of musicians, record labels and consumers.
While Apple may have dodged a bullet in France, pressure to open up Apple's FairPlay format is surfacing elsewhere. Consumer groups in Norway, Sweden and Denmark accused Apple of violating contracts with its product usage regulations, and asked governments to take action earlier this month.
Why is it so important that people are able to play music on non-Apple devices, but not such a big deal to have MS application run on non MS platforms? If we extend this ruling, shouldn't MS Exchange be forced to run on Unix/Linux and OS X? And, shouldn't MS thereby be forced to make all Windows Media playable on other OSes like Linux and OS X.
Sorry, I don't have sympathy for anyone who buys from iTunes and whines that they can't play on a non-Apple device. Don't buy from iTunes if you don't want to play your music on an iPod. There are plenty of other good options out there with large music collections. If you are an audiophile, then you have even more reason to avoid iTunes. Only WMA compatible devices work with some of the services that offer uncompressed audio downloads.
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|It's in teresting that France is such a pu**y. Why we wasted thousands of our young men in WW2 is beyond me. Hell, the French wouldn't even fight less their capitol might be destroyed. Compare that to the English who withstood all the Nazis could throw at them and still fought on. Itunes should be treated as any other business. But let's remember that this is a country that passed a law directed at the Muslim population barring displays of religious items including the Muslim scarf worn by women.
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|tscar12, your post was totally out of topic and blatantly ignorant of the political situation in France, as well as of historical facts.
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|Your comment is really inappropriate. Remember that if it were not for the French the American Revolution never would have succeeded and we would still be a British colony. The graciousness of French people and their love of our values inspired them to donate the Statue of Liberty to America. There are plenty of reasons for our countries to be great friends.
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|oh, please... someone remove that spam...
[edit: the spam comment i was refering to seems to have been removed by a moderator]
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|yea I agree, dont go there, you'll more than likly get adware unto your comp.
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|All I know is Apple's refusal to let companies make hardware to play their music is pissing me off.
I would love to be able to use my Roku with my purchased iTunes music. It's like Apple is ENCOURAGING people to crack their files and or just download illegal music to play on their systems.
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|France will "open wide" (that's the sanitized version; you can guess what the original was) for anyone with cash.
As many other governments will.
The entertainment industry has a lot of money.
End of discussion.
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|so instead of putting up with drm why doesnt everybody just dl their music
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|The DADVSI law is not about Apple, but about Copyright, author rights, DRM, downloads, artists' remuneration, and peer-to-peer software in general.
And that law is _very_ bad, because Free Software developers can be sued over software that _may_ be used to transmit copyrighted contents.
Furthermore, interoperability is threatened too, especially now that it has been made illegal to circumvent protection schemes, so now it's becoming illegal to read encrypted DVDs on Linux (3 years in jail ??? wtf does that means ?).
There's also something in France, called "private copy right" that is being changed, making it meaningless because copyright holders will have the right to decide that consumers can make "zero" copies of the bought material, while the private copy tax still exists...
The worst thing is these matters will be affected to a government-independant commission made of pseudo-experts that will most probably be subject to financial pressure from big companies to rule in their favor.
All in all, it's consumer freedom that's being threatened, and a lot of voices are already speaking up against this, in France and in other countries as well.
More information there:
http://defectivebydesign.org/
http://eucd.info/ (fr)
http://www.fsf.org/
http://stopdrm.info/ (fr)
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