France To Force iTunes to Open to Other Players? 325
JordanL writes "It appears that France is pushing through a law that some feel may force Apple to open iTunes to other players. From the article: 'Under a draft law expected to be voted in parliament on Thursday, consumers would be able to legally use software that converts digital content into any format. It would no longer be illegal to crack digital rights management -- the codes that protect music, films and other content -- if it is to enable to the conversion from one format to another.'"
Consumer rights and IP (Score:5, Informative)
Some explanations ... (Score:4, Informative)
Fnac is a quite powerfull culture oriented retail group that has setup their own music file format. The point is that FNAC is one of the biggest music product seller in France. It has been proven by testers that Fnac salespersons were "not pushing at all" the Apple products and trying to push the products that were compatible with the online Fnac music store !
The law is just adding more anti-trust principles on digital music, so that corporate trust can not force people to by their own product and can not force the the people to by only at their shop.
Re:L'iPod (Score:5, Informative)
There is a grammatical error, the correct writing is: L'iPod est mort, vive l'iPod.
See ? Being French is advantageous. Anytime someone tries to write something in french on /. you can be sure to find an error. So just do like me:
1- Reply to fix the error.
2- Wait for the nice "+5, Informative" mod.
3- ???
4- Karma increased !
Re:Journalism at its finest (Score:4, Informative)
This law is as strict as the american one.
The truth is that the french government want the online music store to open themselves to all the mp3 player but with the drm not without. They want them to use the same type of drm( I really don't think apple and microsoft care about France
If you understand french, go there http://eucd.info/ [eucd.info]. You will understand France is no longer freedom's country
Re:Microsoft as well? (Score:3, Informative)
Misleading article (Score:5, Informative)
The French parliament is currently discussing new laws, that will implement the EUCD directive, by forbidding and severly punishing any attempt to circumvent DRM protection and copyrighted material downloads. This project is called DADvSI.
Some MPs are even pushing to forbid the development, diffusion and the use of P2P software.
Lots of (artits, users, musicians, etc.) communities are opposed to all this.
MPs first voted against this project and adopted a global licence (monthtly fee for unrestricted private downloads), but the French minister of Culture said it was not acceptable and he had the parliament to re-discuss the project again.
More information (all in French) at:
http://fr.news.yahoo.com/10032006/7/projet-dadvsi
http://eucd.info/ [eucd.info]
http://lestelechargements.fr/ [lestelechargements.fr]
http://www.odebi.org/new/theme/ [odebi.org]
http://www.adami.fr/ [adami.fr]
Why Apple ? (Score:1, Informative)
The draft law just states that any digital rights management system owner should provide device manufacturers access to its DRM system, for interoperability reasons.
So, for instance Apple could require from Microsoft that it provides a licence in order for the IPods to be able to play WMA files.
" Les licences de développement des mesures techniques de protection sont accordées aux fabricants de systèmes techniques ou aux exploitants de services qui veulent mettre en oeuvre l'interopérabilité, dans des conditions équitables et non discriminatoires, lorsque ces fabricants ou exploitants s'engagent à respecter, dans leur domaine d'activité, les conditions garantissant la sécurité de fonctionnement des mesures techniques de protection qu'ils utilisent. "
It's a false claim. (Score:2, Informative)
The goal was to force DRM everywhere event if the content was a free WebRadio with free content.
The second goal was to allow justice actions against every software that could be used to break copyright laws. (aka : remove DRM, exchange files, etc, etc.)
The third goal was to track users who share and download files to make sanctions.
BUT
They tryed to vote the law the 23 december 2005 at 23h pm so nobody is at the parlement to oppose the law.
They declared this law "urgent" so no consultation is needed.
French associations mobilised and include an amandement to make file sharing LEGAL.
So the law project was blocked for a while.
Now, discussions in the parlement has come back again and the debate is ridiculous : some want DRM and sanctions and others want free filesharing with taxes.
I think this law project will be completely removed, but who knows ?
Wait the vote if you really want to know what my country will do about file sharing. For now, everything and it's contrary has been told.
Greatings
A French observer. (sorry for my english)
In related news.. (Score:5, Informative)
The same thing has been happening in both sweden [computerworld.no] and Norway [forbrukerportalen.no].
And atleast for Norways case, I don't actually think there's any doubt iTunes are breaking Norwegian law. I mean, seriously.. retro-actively changing the terms of a deal, and claiming the other party has no right to reject or get out the deal is as silly as it gets.
As it stands, if the iTunes EULA was legal and enforcable they could just add a clause saying 'Give us all your money!', and you'd be legally bound to do it.
Re:Some explanations ... (Score:3, Informative)
Steve Jobs has gone on record as saying that DRM isn't the answer).
Where? Jobs is 100% in favour of DRM... as can be seen by the design (DRM in hardware) of the new Intel Macs designed to provide a means for music and video to be completely tied to one machine. You might also like to consider that DRM refers to "digital information"... which is a lot more than just music and video. Among other things (such as emails, spreadsheet, word processing documents)... it also controls computer code -- something that Apple supports openly.
Misinformation and French DMCA (Score:3, Informative)
The main objective of this project it the legal protection of the "technical protection measures" (DRM) and the outlawing of their circumvention.
The french project though, goes much further in that direction than what the directive imposes, it is, in its current state, the most restrictive DMCA in the world!
The activists of the Free Software Foundation France founded the EUCD.INFO initiative [eucd.info] to fight against those legal restriction that endengers the interoperability and the will of Free Software developpers.
This Vanneste guy is the "rapporteur", which means he is the one who wrote the law, and he is very unpleased that some of the EUCD.INFO amendements may be included in his project, rendering it an inoffensive version of the DMCA, comparable to the US one with some of the recent exceptions.
There is a long list of incredible things done by Vanneste (including being recognized guilty in his trial for homophobic declarations, protesting against a pacifist movie about the Algerian decolonization war with extreme-right folks, passing a law which recognize the positive role of colonization, etc...), and by the government (propaganda about "unlawful downloading" being the point of all this law project, opening a propaganda [lestelechargements.com] website about it which censors a so-called "democratic debate" where 95% of the comments are against that law project, removing amendements voted by the parliament which are in the opposite direction of the general restrictive axis, pushing amendments written by Vivendi-Universal, etc.)
I think you'll hear again about this DADVSI (the short name for "author's right and neighbour's right in the information society) law project, whatever the outcome may be!
Re:More "Nanny State" Nonsense (Score:3, Informative)
FUD. When launched the iPod was an MP3 player. It still plays MP3s. I rip everything as MP3 because that is the most portable format. Yes Ogg has better quality but you are limited in what you can play it back on. That you need a piece a free software to drop the music on shouldn't be an issue really. In case you didn't know iTunes is quite happy to let you store the MP3's wherever and however you want to. Nothing is forced on you.
Re:Journalism at its finest (Score:1, Informative)
Re:More "Nanny State" Nonsense (Score:3, Informative)
Go look up "Gnupod". It's a command line set of tools for dealing with the ipod.
The iPod is not locked to DRM controlled music. You can basically play any mp3/aac (low profile) audio. Heck I used ffmpeg to encode movies to fit on it just fine even.
On an unrelated topic [but usefull if you're considering buying an ipod]. The one big downside to the iPod is it relies on spinning down the HD for most of it's power saving features. This means if you have say 9 songs in your playlist it will buffer half or more of them to memory which involves a lot of reading. Then shut off the disk and play from buffer.
This works great. Except if you're like me and like jumping around in the tracks. The iPod doesn't have a "don't buffer mode" so each time you skip tracks it reads ~25MB of data off disk then spins down. Spinning up again when you change tracks.
In my primitive tests I found it could play straight for about 2 hours before going down a "tick" on the battery meter. Now if you swap songs every ~6-10 mins or so it goes down the same tick in about 45 mins. So if you want an iPod I suggest you invest in a second spare battery (external works best). I've flown over the Atlantic with mine and a spare battery...
Tom
Re:Some explanations ... (Score:4, Informative)
With the exception of Apple using its own system and a few small companies selling straight mp3 files, all the big online music distributors use MS DRM. Do you real need me to mention names? Napster, EMI, Vivendi Universal, Virgin and many others. Are they succesful? I don't know and I never implied that they were!
And why should Apple use WMA? And MS DRM?
I never say Apple should use WMA!
The online music market is divided in 3:
Apple and its FairPlay DRM
All the other big distributors and their MS DRM
Some small distributors use MP3 or OGG
Re:Journalism at its finest (Score:2, Informative)
Some may disagree.
The top twenty grossing tours from 2005 [eonline.com]
I know this is Gross, but I'm sure there was a bit left over.
At the other end of the scale there are thousands of bands, without recording contracts, playing local venues. They dont make any money at all except from playing live and merchandise.