EU Officials Cautious on AntiTrust Issues

An anonymous reader writes "News.com has a piece up looking at reactions from EU officials to the iTMS antitrust case. The individuals involved are wary of cracking open the DRM that protects the music sold at the iTunes Music Store." From the article: "One of the most outspoken government advocates on the issue is Norwegian consumer ombudsman Bjorn Erik Thon, who said he would act soon depending on how Apple responds to a letter the government had sent the company. If Apple can require an iPod for songs via iTunes, then music, book and film companies might restrict their products to specific players too, he said."

Comments

"Just don't buy it" is a fallacy.

[plasmacutter]

I refer you to this article on "why market forces cannot correct DRM"

Further.. only in commodity type markets where there are substitute goods do people actually have the choice to "buy from another vendor". Copyrighted works are a monopoly market, and for this excercise the morality of this monopoly is not what is in question.. it's the way the market is. As such you do not have the option of buying the work from a vendor with less restrictions, there is only one vendor.

Confusing Capitalism with Monopoly:

[plasmacutter]

Every time I see articles objecting to DRM lockin schemes I see some corporate brainwashee come out saying "but just dont buy the DRM, the people making the DRM aren't selling the content"

This is fallacious and misleading.

Look, i'll spell this out for you:

just because the maker of the DRM/Player isnt the sole marketer of the copyrighted work doesn't mean consumers actually have a choice.

Copyright is a government mandaded monopoly, and that means that anyone who wants to market it either gives the Copyright Holder his draconian DRM or can cry in the corner, and the copyright holder can easily dictate minimum restrictions.

This means that if you don't buy into one drm-lockin platform you have to buy into another or not buy at all.. and that's about as much of a choice as "living in a facist dictatorship or not living at all". What will you do, lock yourself away in a cave or live with mennenites?

in the case of CD's which don't have actual encryption, they now include autorun software, etc. which is designed to disable your computer, so there is no argument that CD's are DRM free anymore. Granted people with technical knowledge can circumvent the majority of DRM atm, but the argument being made is for the 85% of the market which does not have that knowledge.. and what happens to the remaining 15% as they make it more robust and crack resistant?