France To Force iTunes to Open to Other Players?

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.'"

Comments

Consumer rights and IP

[ajdlinux]

It seems to me that the French government is protecting consumer rights from music companies who just want to force their ways of protecting 'Intellectual Property'. Slashdot last year had a story about the Australian government introducing copyright amendment laws to make private copying of videos and TV shows (only for private purposes of course) legal.

Some explanations ...

[Anonymous Coward]

"The law would also mean that other online French music retailers such as Fnac, part of PPR, would have to make iTunes songs available on their Web sites."

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:Some explanations ...

[lovebyte]

Which highly successful companies are you talking about?
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:L'iPod

[this great guy]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

No no, you're totaly wrong with this. I'm french so i know what i'm talking about. The law which is about to be voted is the inverse. I will be now ILLEGAL to crack drm, and even conturn the protection of the dvd to read it on a linux for example could be consider as illegal too.
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 ...), but use drm become an obligation. I repeat conturn them will now be stricly forbidden.

If you understand french, go there http://eucd.info/. You will understand France is no longer freedom's country ...

Misleading article

[romain wartel]

I'm afraid the article does not relate *at all* what happens in France at the moment, regarding DRM and "Internet piracy".

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- la-licence-globale-repasse-la-trappe.html
http://eucd.info/
http://lestelechargements.fr/
http://www.odebi.org/new/theme/
http://www.adami.fr/

In related news..

[hyfe]

To the ones wondering if France is big enough a market to force change;

The same thing has been happening in both sweden and Norway.
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.