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.

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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.

Regardless of Apple's stake, this isn't about Apple, it's about a consumer's right to play his music on any device. Perhaps this isn't the best of laws, but we certainly need more positive action on this, so I say bravo France, merci beaucoup.

BTW nice of Apple to respond, but imo they're just making a technical and political statement that appeals to their content provider's concerns. I'd rather they say something aimed at their customers but we mostly don't care and keep on buying anyway, so why should they.

BTW2 copyright, trademark, proof of origin and such have nothing to do with the DRM restrictions at issue. So don't confuse champagne and other AOC's with this. Or would you like Samsung to name its MP3 players "iPod"?

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

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.

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Al Swearengen wrote:
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.

Looking beyond the fact that iTunes is still an Apple product and therefor perfectly fitting with the monopoly idea, I think it's fairly safe to say that increasing digital download sales through iTMS are directly related to huge iPod sales. People buy songs to load onto their iPods and take with them. And therein lies the problem. If everyone could use the songs then iPods would face a lot steeper competition from similar non-Apple devices.

Basically this just seems to me that Apple doesn't want to run the risk of anyone having a real chance at cutting into their massive digital music/iPod profits. By bringing out the piracy boogeyman they seem to be just jumping on the bandwagon driven by the RIAA, spreading propaganda to protect their profits.

Generally I'm a big fan of Apple products, but the fact is the iTMS isn't particularily good for artists, labels, consumers or anyone else other than Apple itself.

I doubt it and once the DRM is removed from a song or a movie, its gone and the copying can begin.

Does requiring other companies to support FairPlay make it less secure? I don't see how unless the someone leaks it.

Oh but don't leak the fact that you can burn a song to a audio CD and then re-import it into iTunes - DRF free!

This French law may be goofy but Apple's arguments are self serving at best and just plain wrong.

Also, do you think Microsoft want's to share it's "Plays fo sure" DRM? No, it want's to license it and make some dough. Of course since FairPlay has the largest market share, I suppose they think they'll get some more of that market if they play along.

Who would have thought a European country would aid Microsoft's penetration into a market!

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

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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.

As usual, when a company is able to produce a product that everyone enjoys, competitors push lawmakers to pass stupid laws to hinder a company's chance to continue to succeed and affect stock holders.

There are choices for online music purchases other than iTMS and there are choices for MP3 players other than iPod's. Nobody forced anyone to use these services or products.

Besides, what is a monopoly? Market condition where there is only one seller of a certain commodity and able to control supply to enable the company to exert total control over pricing.

If Apple was buying all the competitors to create a monopoly, I would more inclined to agree. At this point, I feel Apple should keep on being successful.

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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.

Let me see..... iTunes already has the ability to burn to CD and rip to MP3, but apparently it's illegal to do so, so France is passing a law to make it legal, and Apple thinks this amounts to state-sponsored piracy?

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.

If it were about consumers at all, they'd be pushing to ABOLISH DRM ENTIRELY.

Instead they're attacking Apple for... What? You can use iTunes on a Mac or a PC, and you can load music the iTMS on to any MP3 player in existance if you bypass the DRM, which is very easy to do.

Apple has the most open DRM scheme their is, and neither the iPod or iTMS locks consumers in.

So what do this fools think their proposed law will accomplish?

Of course. Let me answer my own question...

It's all about corporate raiding.

Apple's the market leader, and nobody else can beat them fairly.

So IBM, Sony, Microsoft, etc. lobby behind a frivolous law that would force Apple to share their DMR with them, so they could go and play in the iPod pool.

That's the only purpose whatsoever this law could serve.

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Intruder wrote:

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.

Ok, fair enough. You're right, iTMS is a pretty good deal for the big 5 (though evidently not enough of a good deal as they're trying to negotiate alternate prices for different types of tracks) and the fact that they're in the business of basically ripping off artists to fill their pockets has little to do with iTunes or Apple. I wasn't very clear in the first statement (I tend to simply dismiss the majors as the incarnations of evil that they are, and forget that most other people don't, haha) what I meant to say is that iTMS doesn't do a hell of a lot for independents who actually need the support. While taking a 35% cut on all sales isn't astronomically high as far as distribution goes, setting a price limit at $0.99 across the board does make a big difference. It's all well and good if you're pressing 100,000 copies and they only cost a couple cents each to manufacture, but for independent labels and artists discs can sometimes cost up to $4 or $5 a piece. If you're selling 12 song album on iTMS that means you're only making a couple bucks a disc which is hardly enough (or rather less than enough) to cover all the promotion, recording and other costs the label incurs when releasing an album. Now of course there's a lot more to get into, as well as answers to the inevitable "well just don't sell your music on iTMS" but I don't think this is really the place.

I also think the fact that there are ways around the copyright protections is fairly irrelevant. This isn't a world of computer nerds. A lot of the people out there are capable of pushing a "Buy Now" button, but try and get them burning, ripping and transfering in any abnormal order and I'm sure they'll somehow manage to light their computers on fire.

Finally, I think everyone has a tendency to get caught up in the "poor Apple" mindset and isn't looking at the issue in the broader sense of copyrights and copyright law in general. Over the past few decades copyright laws have become increasingly the tools of fewer large, rich corporations who use them as a way of maximizing and maintaining their profits now and years into the future, at the expense of both consumers and lesser, poorer producers. I think anything that tries to take a solid shot at that is a step in the right direction.

I can remember back in the eighties when the term 'piracy' was usurped by some idiots in london under the name 'fast' - federation against software theft - and realised that, people being the sheep they are, this would be the downfall of many future ideals. It has now come to pass that I am a criminal on a number of occasions and so are my teenage daughters (although thankfully never prosecuted). Large corporations make large profits and want to make even larger profits. Every little wall built to stop their onslaught is appreciated. Go for it France -

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Intruder wrote:

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.

I am a troll and I have no point. Lots of hate, but no point.

"Large corporations make large profits and want to make even larger profits. Every little wall built to stop their onslaught is appreciated. Go for it France -"

The law's entire purpose is to give Apple's competitors a window into the iPod.

Apple's competitors are large corporations that want larger profits.

If this law passes, they'll make those larger profits.


So you want to stop their onslaught? Good work on championing a law that does the exact opposite.

The thing is that law was not designed to counter Apple — at all. Under previous laws, DRM were completely illegal, as they prevented people to access to contents they had paid for.Tribunals condemned companies to pay customers that were unable to listen to their CDs or make copies for their private use because of DRM. It was also legal to download copyrighted content, and that was considered faire use. It wasn't however, to upload this content, and that was considered counterfeiting.
That law will allow DRM measures, as well as limiting the number of copies, and make downloading illegal. Since allowing DRM measures was quite a controversial issue, the government had to accept this idea of interoperability. It is only a side effect, not the main purpose of the law.

I am an irritant to everybody that knows me.

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.

I occurs to me that Apple has other options than just pulling out of the Freench market if this law goes forward.

They can just sell songs in regular ACC format without the Fairplay DRM. Of course, the music companies won't like that, but Apple can point to the law to back the decision. That allows other players to use songs bought from iTunes MS (since ACC is not restricted to iPod).

As for allowing other music stores to sell music that can be played on the iPod: Apple can trustfully claim that they can already do that. Just sell MP3 or ACC files. Of course, the music industry won't like that.

On the flip side, this law would probably require Microsoft to make it's DRM available for Mac OS X and Linux. Since their DRM is even more restrictive than Fairplay: It only runs on Microsoft Windows and only on about 10% of audio players.


In the end, it would be nice if there was a single DRM that works everywhere (or no DRM at all), but not if it's Microsoft's and not if causes compatibity issues (which Apple's closed fairplay system prevents by not having to work on everything under the some). The proposed French law doesn't really have a chance of helping things.

Could it be because iTMS isn't a record company?

iTMS is just well organized supermarket for tunes....