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Apple: French Law Promotes Piracy

by , 7:40 AM EST, March 22nd, 2006

A law that will require companies like Apple, Sony and Microsoft to share Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology with each other made it through the French government's lower house on Tuesday prompted Apple to say that the legislation will promote music and video piracy. The bill, however, isn't law yet. It still has to pass a vote in the French Senate, which could be weeks or months away.

An Apple spokesperson commented "The French implementation of the EU Copyright Directive will result in state-sponsored piracy. If this happens, legal music sales will plummet just when legitimate alternatives to piracy are winning over customers."

The French are working to enact the law to avoid, in part, the possibility of a music and video download monopoly, and are citing the need for device and service interoperability. If the law passes, some analysts expect Apple to shut down the French iTunes Music Store instead of opening it's FairPlay DRM to competitors.

Jonathan Arber, an analyst at Ovum, commented to Bloomberg that Apple was going to have a strong reaction to the French bill because the iTunes Music Store is built on the "lack of interoperability with other devices and services."

According to Apple, iPod sales are likely to increase as French consumers load up on interoperable songs that can't be adequately protected. "Free movies for iPods should not be far behind in what will rapidly become a state-sponsored culture of piracy."

Observer Comments

Show: Subjects Only | Full Comments
Close Name:Al Swearengen Posts: 339 Joined: 10 May 2005
Subject: Why just music

This bill is supposed to be about preventing monopolies. But you don't need an iPod to play music purchased from the iTMS, you can play it in the free iTunes program.

France protects the term "champagne", If the wine doesn't come from the Champagne District in France then you have to call it sparkling wine or something. They should open up champagne to other wineries.

Promoting piracy? I would like to see a scientific study on just how much music and video is currently being pirated.

Close Name:Biff Posts: 1479 Joined: 08 Apr 2004
Subject:

Quote
Al Swearengen wrote:
Promoting piracy? I would like to see a scientific study on just how much music and video is currently being pirated.
Wait what? Sorry you lost me there man. You did notice Apple said this, right? Just not sure cause the rest of your post seemed anti-France.

But anyhow it should be fairly obvious that an accurate study of music piracy would in fact be impossible to conduct. But thats not the point. Apple was saying that opening up FairPlay will make it very easy for others to crack it and render it useless.

View Name:Guest
Subject: This is not about Apple
Close Name:switchtoamac Posts: 3 Joined: 13 Mar 2006
Subject: Apple statement hints at Movie Download Service?

An exceprt from Apple's statement:

"Free movies for iPods should not be far behind in what will rapidly become a state-sponsored culture of piracy."

I'm inclined to intrepret the above statement to mean that Apple would oppose "free movies" on iPods. If so, one must ask if this an indication that Apple is working on a movie download service

http://switchtoamac.com

Close Name:nealg Posts: 121 Joined: 22 Mar 2006
Subject: Re:This is not about Apple

Of course it is about Apple.

If this is really about consumers choice, make sure that all mp3 manufacturers make their software work on a Mac.

And why just stop there. Make sure that all websites work on Safari, especially those by the French government. Make sure that all software makers make all their most popular software work on a Mac.

These measures would give computer users a true choice of which platform to use, and not just for music. There are work arounds for getting music from iTunes onto other platforms and vice versa.

View Name:Guest
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Subject: Is FairPlat stopping pirates?
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Subject:
Close Name:Al Swearengen Posts: 339 Joined: 10 May 2005
Subject: Frank O'Phyle

Quote
Guest wrote:
If France wewre a US State, it would be the fifth poorest, so who cares.


Compared to other nations France's economy was #8 in 2005 with a GDP of $1,737,000,000,000

Biff, I am not anti-French. I was tying to compare France's monopoly on champagne to to Apple's alleged monopoly on personal music players.

View Name:Guest
Subject:
Close Name:Intruder -   TMO Mac Specialist Posts: 3014 Joined: 07 Jul 2004
Subject:

Quote
Anonymous wrote:
...the fact is the iTMS isn't particularily good for artists, labels, consumers or anyone else other than Apple itself.


Interesting. According to The Register, the breakdown of costs for ITMS is $.70 to the labels, $.20 for Apple's costs (servers, credit card processing, etc.), and $.10 (rounded figures) to Apple's bottom line.

Or, to put it in context, at 1B songs downloaded, that would be $700,000,000 for the labels, and $100,000,000 for Apple. Apple is doing the work here, not the labels (as far as advertising and distribution is concerned).

Sounds like it is pretty good for the labels, anyway. How they divide that up with the artists is another question.

View Name:Guest
Subject: This is nonsense, Apple!
Close Name:yoyo52 Posts: 1171 Joined: 02 Feb 2002
Subject:

I think there are at least two different issues in this whole business. First, I agree with what seems to be the French position, that laws that preserve copyright protection, which is what Apple's DRM seeks to do, badly need to be changed. It's almost impossible to know what "fair use" means any more, not just in the case of music, but with all copyrighted material. I teach, and follow copyright laws scrupulously, but nonetheless I think it's completely and totally absurd that I (i. e. my students) have to pay some publishing company a buck or more a page to make copyrighted material available to my classes. One time I wanted to xerox about ten pages from one text, but the pages had originally been published in another text, the copyright to which was owned by another publishing house, and found myself paying twice for the privilege of having students read the material. A similar thing happens with music when I own a song on vinyl, but to make digital copies of what I own is somehow illegal. The law is an ass, as they used to say in Shakespeare's day.

But second, that the new French law is directed specifically at Apple is equally absurd. As I recall, Apple negotiated with content providers, who would not let Apple make their content available on line unless Apple made some provision like FairPlay to protect the providers' copyright. In othe words, Apple is only the middle man in the whole enterprise. If France wants to change copyright law, then they ought to attack the copyright holder, not the middle man. I know that arguing by analogy is dangerous, but in some ways Apple in this case is like a library, the library at my school, for instance, which makes it impossible for me to put xeroxed material on reserve for more than one semester because the law says that doing so violates copyright. It would be absurd to attack the library because it's doing what the copyright law requires it to do. Similarly, it is absurd to attack Apple because it's doing what the law (here the contract it worked out with the providers) requires it to do.

My real fear is that unless the whole of the copyright framework gets addressed, and addressed globally, the result of the proposed French law will be that content providers will refuse to make their material available on line, period. And then we'll have a heck of a lot of choice . . . forget about music on mp3 players and on computers, or pirate the music.

View Name:Guest
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Subject:
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Subject: Copyright Nonsense
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Close Name:Mikuro Posts: 453 Joined: 15 Jun 2002
Subject: Apple's spreading FUD

Apple's argument is weak. FairPlay, as it currently stands, does absolutely nothing to prevent any dedicated pirate. (Transcoding it to a DRM-free format is trivial, and you can even strip out the DRM from the original AAC if you know how.) How would making it compatible with other players and services make it worse?

Aside from that, there is no shortage of pirated content available. If all the iTMS content were added to the world of pirated music, it would be a drop in the bucket. People who want to pirate WILL PIRATE. Heck, they'll probably pirate it in a higher quality format than what Apple offers, too.

The law doesn't require Apple to change the terms of their license agreement. It just requires Apple to let other companies use the content the same way they can.

I certainly understand why Apple is against this — if non-iPods can play iTMS content, then that will surely lead to a decline in the iPod's market share — but piracy is absolutely not the issue here. Shame on Apple for resorting to such smoke-and-mirrors debating tactics.

I'm with the French on this one. Anything that opens up DRM is good for consumers.

View Name:Guest
Subject:
View Name:Guest
Subject: iTMS doesn't do a hell of a lot for independents
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