French Lawmakers Approve 'iTunes Law'

An anonymous reader writes "Lawmakers in the French government have passed a controversial iTunes law, which has the stated intention of forcing Apple to allow purchased music to be universally useable." From the article: "In a statement issued after lawmakers hashed out the final compromise text last week, Apple said it hoped the market would be left to decide 'which music players and online music stores are offered to consumers.' The final compromise asserts that companies should share the required technical data with any rival that wants to offer compatible music players and online stores, but it toned down many of the tougher measures backed by lower-house lawmakers early on."

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What's that sound?

[Blahbooboo3]

I hear the sound of millions of voices in French screaming in agony as they lose Itunes/Ipods.... Sounds like the French will be buying their music from other EU countries Itune stores....

The market can only decide if it CAN decide

[Opportunist]

It's quite cynical from a patent holder to invoke the right for free trade and the idea that in a free market the customer will settle the question which good is better.

He cannot.

Actually, the French decision IS the epitome of free trade: BOTH products, the iPod and iTunes have to succeed as the best platform. You can't have one product "tag along" with the other one. BOTH have to be successful to be the main player.

Now, I wonder if that verdict can be applied to the hassle around Windows and Media Player/IE...

Just like France

[TheBogie]

This is just like France to try to limit what a business can do. If Apple wants to sell music that only plays on their player, that is okay. If it upsets consumers, they will buy their music from somewhere else. This is how business is supposed to work, right? Next thing you know they will insist that Apple not fire any employees under 26 who have worked there more than a year blah blah blah.

It's About Time...

[DesireCampbell]

It's about time that someone otyher than Microsoft was forced to play nice with their competitors.

I still think it's stupid to force a company to help it's rivals - but at least the EU's trying to be fair about it.

Re:Funny

[shotfeel]

I'm not sure it does anything. From TFA

The final compromise asserts that companies should share the required technical data with any rival that wants to offer compatible music players and online stores,

So for music from the iTMS, the "technical data" is to burn to CD, rip to mp3, transfer to music player of choice.

To play on the iPod, other music stores just need to sell music in non-protected form (AAC or mp3).

Note that AFAIK (from summarized English translations) it says nothing of the process being free, easy, or lossless.

Re:When government needs to butt out.

[PCM2]

This whole law smacks of Frances communist-like laws to give poorly run French buisnesses a chance by gimping the better run foreign competitors.

Oh yeah, and the United States' capitalist-like laws have never done that.

Controversial

[Digital Vomit]

"Lawmakers in the French government have passed a controversial iTunes law, which has the stated intention of forcing Apple to allow purchased music to be universally useable."

How sad that a law that is in the best interests of the people in a democracy -- and of society as a whole -- is considered "controversial".

Apple said it hoped the market would be left to decide 'which music players and online music stores are offered to consumers.

And let the mythical "invisible hand of the free market" take care of consumers? Yeah, right.

The final compromise asserts that companies should share the required technical data with any rival that wants to offer compatible music players and online stores

Damn right. Proprietary file formats are an abomination unto human civilization!

Sorry. I've had a little too much sugar...

I agree!

[COMON$]

And while we are at it we need to make sure that all data is universal to every device, I am pissed that my 35mm camera film is not accepted by my iPod and that AAA batteries are not easily converted to work in my D cell devices. My dell laptop batteries wont work in my Thinkpad, and rant on....

Seriously if people dont like iTunes format then dont buy them...there are plenty of options.

Re:When government needs to butt out.

[govtpiggy]

Have you never heard of tariffs? That is the essence of "gimping the better run foreign competitors" and is law in the US.

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Re:The market can only decide if it CAN decide

[gerardrj]

So, by your logic the iTMS and iPod are two completelty separate and unrelated products and should not be associated and depend on each other for sales.

To extend that logic slightly, Chevy should be required to tell eveyone how their engine control system works so you aren't required to purchase their engine and transmission along with the car; perhaps they should be required to also offer Volvo, Cummins or Ferrari engines. Or they should be required to sell multiple brands of seats.

Re:The market can only decide if it CAN decide

[Opportunist]

Actually no. Free trade is not ONLY based on the manufacturer's right to choose what he wants to produce and how. It ALSO depends on the customer's ability to choose between the offered products. Only if both parts are working, the market can work.

If the manufacturer has a monopoly, he can squeeze out the most shoddy piece of crap possible and, if you want an item with the uses of the product, you HAVE to buy this shoddy piece of crap.

That is what was the Communist's downfall. The products were crap and there was no choice, so the products did not improve because they did not have to, you had to buy them anyway. The most visible items of this mismanagement is the cars from former East Block, they pretty much stopped their development in the late 50s!

If the customer has not the ability to choose, the producers will stop developing. If there is no need to improve because the customer cannot simply choose a different item, there will be no improvement.

Re:Understand

[needacoolnickname]

The part that every whiner doesn't understand.

If they can't do it the way they want then it's not possible.

Re:The market can only decide if it CAN decide

[posterlogo]

It's quite cynical from a patent holder to invoke the right for free trade and the idea that in a free market the customer will settle the question which good is better. He cannot. Actually, the French decision IS the epitome of free trade: BOTH products, the iPod and iTunes have to succeed as the best platform. You can't have one product "tag along" with the other one. BOTH have to be successful to be the main player.

NO idea what you're talking about. Patents are fully compatible with free trade. In this case, there isn't really even a patent on the idea of listening to music in a digital format. All anyone has to do to get into this business is license the music from the copyright holder, and make your own damn online store and digital player. Oh wait, but you're not really going to be able to offer it at 99c, right? Thanks France, you just made it easier for the RIAA to anally probe us all. Itunes is a free software package. You can download music and play it on itunes. That is the purpose of the software package. A separate hardware package, the iPod, enables you to take that music onto a portable player. WTF is so hard to understand about that? Want an ipod, but not iTunes music? FINE!!! Get some mp3s. Want iTunes, but no iPod? FINE!!! What is the problem here?? You want neither, FINE!!! No one is shoving these products down our throats.

Re:Understand

[drinkypoo]

What part of "if I wanted shit quality due to multiple encodes I would have taped it off the radio" don't you understand? You don't even have to burn and re-rip if you use totalrecorder or something, but you have the same loss of quality when you re-encode no matter what your process.

Re:Apple already complies

[Anonymous Coward]

You are missing the point.
I compromise on song quality by burning to cds and ripping back to mp3. Whereas, a cross format rights management solution would help me preserve the sound quality..

Also, iTMS does not have all the songs that I like. In that case, I need to buy songs from other stores and heck, I cannot play them on my iPod. I pay for my music and I should be allowed to play it in any player of my choice.

I can understand that ur an apple fanboy. But, remember that all the slashdot arguments would have been upside down if this was against msn Microsoft rather than an apple.

Re:Just like France

[Anonymous Coward]

Your analogy sucks: you are foolishly and narrowly picking "music player" to mean iPod or iPod competitor. Strangely, I can play my DRMed music on my Macs, PCs, iPods, the iPods of anyone I know, I can burn it on a million CDs, and for less than $10, I can connect my iPod to any car or stereo through a simple wire and/or FM transmitter. As far as I can tell, taking a few simple steps as a consumer, it is the least-locked musica format I have ever possessed. People buy tracks without having iPods. People have iPods without using the iTMS. Opening up iTMS tracks to other players requires the removal of all protection because WMA-DRM is inherently tethered, and how is Apple to know who to tie you to if you choose to leave their business?

France is creating a technological nightmare because it doesn't understand the market or where the market is going. There are tons and tons of fields and products that would look different in the marketplace if governments interfered and forced companies to overcome technological boundaries that improved consumer choice, but they don't because it does legislate companies overcoming technological bounds which are best left to the competitive sphere.

Re:Apple already provides this within iTunes.

[Secrity]

Complying with the directive by "allowing" people to jump through hoops to create inferior music files is not acceptable.

Re:It's not about helping your rivals

[Opportunist]

You're not forced to use them, no. But that's not the point.

The point is that people want to have a portable music player. They don't care what manufacturer is from (let's take the "ideal" customer for now, and he has no irrational preferences for any brand).

Now, this ideal customer makes the decision which player to get. And, being the ideal customer, he is also ideally informed (i.e. he knows everything about every player on the market).

Now he also knows that iTunes is maybe the most comfortable way for him to buy online music. So he will buy an iPod because he cannot choose another player if he wants that.

The point isn't that I don't want an iPod. The point is that I want the iPod to succeed because it is the better player and not because it has a foot in the door with iTunes. The customer does not care which player he gets, he chooses the "best" model for him. And here the iPod has the advantage of being "hauled along" with iTunes, a quasi-monopoly Apple has on the content side for your gear.

The goal is to keep Apple at its toes to make better iPods with better batteries, more space and so on. I don't want to "hurt" Apple, but I do want the best player for my money. And with the advantage of iTunes, Apple could create players that are under par compared with the competing manufacturers of portable music players and they'd still sell.

And that doesn't look good in my books of free market. He who makes crap should perish. He who creates better goods should rise.

Re:Understand

[Anonymous Coward]

What part of "if I wanted shit quality due to multiple encodes I would have taped it off the radio" don't you understand? You don't even have to burn and re-rip if you use totalrecorder or something, but you have the same loss of quality when you re-encode no matter what your process.

If you can hear the additional loss incurred by re-ripping to 192 kbps MP3, you have better ears than 99% of the population.

That means that iTunes isn't a good option for you to begin with.

Re:Confusing

[blugu64]

"If you can't afford an ipod, you probbaly can't afford to buy music online either. The ipod is in the highest bracket of the market, they sell their product to people who can afford the best product and who can afford to buy music. The cheap knock off mp3 players are generally only used by people who pirate all their music, so I don't see the point in opening up the Itunes market to them anyway...."

Nice broad sweeping generalizations there.

"Also, people who don't use ipods generally don't have as much love for music as ipod users. Basically, buying a stripped down no-name mp3 player is doing a disrespect to the music you listen to. I for one am I big U2 fan, so I bought the U2 ipod to listen to U2 and show my love for this talented Irish Group."

Also nice to know that if you don't have the money for an iPod you obviously don't have nearly the love of music as someone who does. (Yes I've got an iPod, the yearly AppleTax Came due).

But here's the thing, you say that listening to your music on a "no-name mp3 player" is doing a "disrespect" to the music you listen to. Well all I've got to say is *all* mp3 players (iPod included) sound like crap next to a good LP on a good turntable, and that listening to music on anything *other* then that is doing a disrespect to your music.

Re:The market can only decide if it CAN decide

[Oxyrubber]

Now, I wonder if that verdict can be applied to the hassle around Windows and Media Player/IE...

Not to be too argumentative, but if this decision was applied directly to the bundling of IE/MediaPlayer/MSN Messenger/Outlook Express, etc., this law WOULD NOT prevent bundling, it would simply say that other companies should have the right to develop competing products (i.e. (Firefox, Mozilla, Opera)/(MediaPlayerClassic or any other codec-compliant video player)/(YIM, AIM, ICQ)/(any email/calendar/contact client)). On a tangental note, I would love to see a 'lite' version of Windows come with a barebones installation that allows the user to select which additional services/applications to install, but for the purposes of this article: that is simply not what the law would equate to.

Unfortunately, it seems that Microsoft's attempts to move into nearly every application field on desktop computers is solified partly because the ordinary computer user will tend to use the 'free' software that comes with their computer, rather than purchase a new program to do nearly the same task. I would rather pay less for Windows and not have to clean off all the 'free' bundled programs that come preinstalled on every installation of Windows, but (in the words of Ron White) "I'm only one man".

Re:Monopoly?

[One Childish N00b]

If not, this it completely and utterly wrong and amounts to socialism.

Of course, this relies on the acceptance of the premise that 'socialism' is 'wrong'... and judging by your ending statement of 'The French have lost a lot of battles, my guess is they'll lose their fight with Apple too.', I can only assume this is more American France-bashing.

How will France lose their battle with Apple? Are Apple going to go to war with France? Of course not - they'll both lose, as Apple will lose revenue and the French government will lose taxes on that revenue. Whatever you think about France's decision here, equating 'socialism' with 'wrongness' is subjective, and cheap shots about French military victories (PML PUT IT IN GOOGLE LOL!) simply cheapen your post further.

Other than that, good try, thanks for playing.

Re:Understand

[NutscrapeSucks]

Yeah, why should people complain about a process that was specifically designed to be a pain in the ass and suboptimal in terms of results? How completely irrational.

Re:Funny

[modeless]

I don't understand this, because we don't need "technical data". Breaking the DRM is the easy part; the hard part is avoiding the lawyers. What we need is for breaking the DRM to be legal!

Re:French Lawmakers - Why do they care?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I think it is an issue of deliberate lock-in. We wouldn't dream of buying a Sony CD, much less having to buy Sony's CD player in order to use Sony's CD. Then if you bought a Philips CD, you'd have to use a Philips player. It is a regression of formats to go from something that was open and now it is either locked to a certain brand product or you have to degrade the quality to play it in some other device. That Tunebite program is only a loop-back reencoder, it doesn't just strip the protection, it also degrades audio quality again to use it in some other product.

Another concern brought up by the Scandinavian cases is that Apple reserves the right to change the terms of the use of the product after you've paid for it, and you get no recourse if you don't like what they do.

it is already 'universally usable'

[johnrpenner]

if you burn your iTunes Store DRM tracks onto an Audio CD,
it will no longer be DRM protected, and it can be freely used
and converted for use on any other player -- the issue is not
a matter of can/cant, but of convenience.

2cents

Let the market decide... HOGWASH!

[zotz]

"Apple said it hoped the market would be left to decide 'which music players and online music stores are offered to consumers.'"

Pure hogwash. "Let the market decide" is a short form of "Let the free market decide."

We are talking devices protected by patents here for playing music and video protected by copyrights. Both forms of government granted monopolies. Where exactly is the free market in all of this again?

all the best,

drew
(da idea man)

Re:The market can only decide if it CAN decide

[zotz]

"NO idea what you're talking about. Patents are fully compatible with free trade."

Perhaps I can help. Patents are not fully compatible with the free market. Copyrights aren't either. Both are forms of GOVERNMENT granted MONOPOLIES.

Now if you want to get the government out of the market with their granting of copyrights and patents and let the market find its own solution to the problem, let us know.

As it is, people want these government granted monopolies (government interventions in the free market) and yet they want to also tell the government to stay out of the market and let the market decide. Which is it to be?

all the best,

drew
(da idea man)

Re:The market can only decide if it CAN decide

[Anonymous Coward]

Patents are fully compatible with free trade.

I disagree. Free trade is founded on the principle of voluntary association. Government is founded on the principle of coercion: it is the organization holding the unique "right" to employ coercion as its business model over a given territory (anyone else who does so is a criminal). That is the only universal, unambiguous definition of government that holds true for every possible government in the past, present, and future.

Patent law, obviously, is not found in nature. It is not derived from human nature and human morality, as a law against theft or physical force. It does not seek to protect against the initiation of force, but represents an initiation of force itself. (One thinking being copying another thinking being's design is not an act of coercion. One thinking being employing force in order to prevent another thinking being from copying a design is, clearly, an act of coercion.) Therefore, patent law is fully incompatible with free trade, and is merely a concoction designed by government, not human nature.

Then again, everything government does beyond its core responsibility of protecting against actual coercion is, obviously, not found in human nature. You have to understand that when people talk about "free trade" and "free market economics" they are really talking about a mix of voluntary association and coercion in the market, not pure voluntary association. What passes as "free trade" is really anything but, and people who refer to the market as "free" are doing freedom a disservice.

Apple's Fairplay vs. more obvious locked platforms

[DECS]

An awful lot of screed is being disgorged about Apple's DRM, despite the fact that it is effortlessly simple to get around. Even the most basic user can make a playlist and burn a CD, then use it in whatever device or platform they desire.

People posting about how they bought lots of iTMS songs, then moved to Linux, and now are hopelessly befuddled about their options, are complete liars pushing FUD.

An interesting comparison that nobody seems to be making: what about all the other platforms that make no effort at interoperability with other hardware or software? Why hasn't Scandinavia or France been grandstanding against:

- Sony Playstation games, which don't play on an Xbox, or a GameCube. None can be burned to CD and played elsewhere.
- Microsoft's Windows platform, which "locks" applications written to its APIs to its own OS? No way to burn your Windows apps to a CD and import them into Linux.
- Apple's Mac OS X software (apart from CLI apps) can't be burned to a CD to run on Linux.
- What about Linux' Gnome and KDE apps? Shouldn't everything be a massively fat binary to run anywhere?

( insert 5,000 other obvious and absurd examples here )

Further, rabidly attacking Apple over DRM is like attacking Starbucks over their coffee bean economics. They're the leaders in fair trade/shade grown/sustainable coffee production, so yeah attack them for trying to give a corporate shit about playing fair, then rejoice after putting them out of business, and watch ADM-CoffeeCo replace them selling Frankincoffee grown in the wake of slash and burned rainforest.

Or, in the case of Apple, do a dance on their tombstone, and then you can get rewarded by the WMA alternative, which doesn't support unlimited CD burning, expires tracks when you stop paying for subscription fees, and will soon only run on Paladium PCs.

How ruthlessly absurd.

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http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Home/3FA34DA6-CD7 A-44C1-9D8A-4AB90106BB4D.html [roughlydrafted.com]
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