What’s French for “Legalized Piracy”?
The French want to tell Apple how its iTunes songs should be formatted, and will permit piracy if Apple doesn’t comply (HT the on hiatus EU Rota):
French plan would open iTunes to other devices
Mon Mar 13, 2006 1:44 PM ETPARIS (Reuters) - France is pushing through a law that would force Apple Computer Inc to open its iTunes online music store and enable consumers to download songs onto devices other than the computer maker’s popular iPod player.
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, said Christian Vanneste, Rapporteur, a senior parliamentarian who helps guide law in France.
“It will force some proprietary systems to be opened up … You have to be able to download content and play it on any device,” Vanneste told Reuters in a telephone interview on Monday.
Music downloaded from Apple’s iTunes online music store currently can only be played on iPods.
The law, if enacted, could prompt Apple to shut its iTunes store in France, some industry observers say, to keep from making songs vulnerable to conversion outside France, too.
For what it’s worth, I happen to agree that Apple ought to open up the iTunes format to other devices, so that’s not the point.
The point is that Apple has should be free to operate its business as it wishes. If it’s making a tactical mistake by keeping the iTunes format proprietary, it will pay dearly. It already happened once — by limiting its Macintosh operating system to Apple Macintosh computers (except for a brief time in the mid-1990s when some Mac clones were allowed), and by pricing Mac computers consistently 20% or more above comparable DOS- and then Windows-based computers throughout the 1990s, Apple saw its computer market share drop from something like 20% to its current 4% or so. Windows, for all its flaws, security holes, etc. became the OS of choice.
Who’s to say that it won’t happen again with iTunes and the iPod, with or without French intervention? Who are the French to dictate company strategy in this manner?
I would hope that there is an international body dealing with copyright protection and intellectual property rights that can step in. Short of that, I could hardly blame Apple if it shut down iTunes in France.
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UPDATE: EU Rota helpfully points out that what the French are doing to iTunes is very similar to what the EU is attempting to force on Microsoft — in this case, revealing source code to and opening up the Windows OS. As much as I don’t like a lot of what Microsoft does, it’s not an anticompetitive or monopolistic practice to keep your trade secrets secret.
