Back in March, the house of the French parliament passed a bill that would require the opening up of all proprietary audio formats in France in order to allow DRM protected music bought at an online store to be converted to a format compatible with the DRM on the user's digital audio player. Apple got angry towards this proposed legislation as they claim it would hurt their business and criticised the move as "state-sponsored piracy".
Now Apple is in talks with French lawyers and the Senate in an aim to get around this legislation. The amendment being proposed would mean that the music store can have copy protection locked if it has made arrangements with the copyright holders. If this amendment is applied, Apple would be able to keep its music's DRM locked to the iPod by negotiating deals with the labels and the artists with a condition that their copy protection remains intact.
Other music stores such as Sony would be able to do the same by negotiating with the artists and labels first. However, this potential loophole does have a drawback in that the artists and labels would need to agree to this condition and that there will be a lot of extra paperwork involved in the negotiations.
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A Senate is to vote on an amendment this week that would create a new regulatory authority with the power to order that exclusive file formats be shared. The regulatory authority would have the power to order copyright protection be removed from digital downloads, but not where there is a competing legal agreement in place. Apple could negotiate deals with recording studios and with artists that includes a clause demanding the copy protection remain. |
If this amendment goes thought, the whole idea of proposing to make DRM interoperable will effectively be thrown out the window, at least when it comes to allowing music bought on iTunes to be played on other DRM compliant MP3 players. There is a good chance that the labels and artists would be happy to have music bought on iTunes locked to iPod players, particularly since both the iPod player and iTunes service covers about a good bulk of the market when it comes to portable players and online music stores respectively. On the other hand, so long as only Apple makes use of this potential legal loophole, other music stores would still need to allow their music to be made interoperable with the iPod.
Feel free to discuss about iTunes and other online music download services on our forum.
Source: CBC Arts
