Europe continues push for iTunes interoperability

Stephen Withers
Monday, 12 March 2007 06:46

IT Industry - Strategy

European pressure on DRM schemes that restrict the use of purchased music to particular types of player (think iTunes and iPod) has stepped up a notch.

EU Consumer Protection Commissioner Meglena Kuneva has been quoted as saying "Do you think it's fine that a CD plays in all CD players but that an iTunes song only plays in an iPod? I don't. Something has to change."

While this overlooks the fact that tracks purchased from the iTunes Store can legitimately be transferred to audio CD - Apple's iTunes software will do this for you - going from protected AAC to CD to MP3 (or some other format supported by other mobile players) does result in some loss of quality, much like photocopying a photocopy.

Scandinavian countries, led by Norway, have been pressing Apple to provide interoperability between iTunes tracks and other manufacturers' players. Apple has until 1 October 2007 to bring the iTunes store into line with Norwegian law.

It remains to be seen how Apple will respond, but one possibility is that it will close the iTunes store to countries where its current business model is considered illegal.

For its part, Apple has been trying to deflect criticism onto the record companies. It was largely Apple's success in persuading those companies that its DRM was sufficiently secure that attracted them to the iTunes Store.

It's not beyond the realms of possibility that Apple could - with the labels' cooperation - use the Norwegian situation to test market reaction to DRM-free music. If sales hold up and there's no corresponding drop in sales of the same titles in other geographies, the sale of unprotected content could spread.

Apple does seem to be strongly against the alternative, which is to allow other companies to use its DRM scheme as mandated by recent French legislation.

The EU is know to be working towards unifying member nations' consumer protection laws, and several countries have expressed concern that there is not the same degree of interoperability between music sold online and portable players from different manufacturers as there is between CDs and CD players, or DVDs and DVD players.

The heart of the issue is the 'lock in' problem - to keep using their libraries of purchased content on portable players, iPod owners must keep buying iPods, Zune owners must keep buying Zunes, and so on.