France and DRM
Is the bill current traversing the French legislature a bad thing?
Apple broke a week of silence late Tuesday, attacking a proposed French law that would open up proprietary music services as equivalent to “state-sponsored piracy.” However, the company stopped short of suggesting that it would pull out of the French market in order to avoid complying with the new legislation. – Ed Oswald
Or a good thing?
There are few Mac users prepared to argue that Microsoft’s monopoly in desktop PCs has been a good thing for the technology industry; why would an Apple monopoly of digital entertainment be any different? Vive la France. – Leander Kahney
DRM is always a bad thing. I will say this about Apple, though: As bad as the tension between FairPlay and PlaysForSure is, personally, I think things would be a whole lot worse if Microsoft had been able to establish a stranglehold on the market. As things stand right now, Apple has a huge lead and Microsoft is relegated to being a fringe player with huge aspirations. I think we may all benefit from this. I think we would benefit even more though if content companies would realize that they are costing themselves more in lost sales than they are gaining in the potential of selling us multiple copies of things we have already bought.
Full disclosure: I haven’t written about this before, but my parents gave me an iPod Nano for Christmas. Mainly what I use it for, though, is listening to podcasts (which it truly excels at). The only thing remotely DRMed I have stored on it is some Audible content… which I still haven’t listened to yet. I have yet to buy a single song from the iTunes music store and I have no plans to do so.
