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Irreconcilable
Differences
The French have a lot to answer for these days: French youth
recently started rioting upon being informed that they may
really have to work for a living; minorities in Parisian suburbs
are upset about years of institutional racism; the rest of
the world considers the French to be insufferable, vain, cheese-eating
surrender monkeys; and the French language sounds really horrible
in hiphop songs.
So, in the midst of all this, the French decide to throw themselves
into the middle of the Digital Rights Management debate. The
lower house of French Parliament has just passed a law that
requires every maker and distributor of digital media to make
details of copy-protection schemes available to competitors,
and to force interoperability among digital formats.
The problem that the French seek to fix is very real, as anybody
who’s spent time trying to navigate the world of “legitimate”
digital music downloads knows. The problem is that songs downloaded
from Apple’s iTunes store only play on Apple iPods, songs
in Microsoft’s Windows Media format can’t play on iPods, and
Windows-based devices can’t play iTunes songs. Then there
is Rhapsody’s Real Player program, which can only play .rm
files. And on and on and on.
So everybody’s got their own formats, which all are configured
to stop you from sharing the music you just bought. Competition
for the sales of digital music, to the extent that there is
any, exists on the player level—once you’ve bought your portable
music player, you’re pretty much locked in to one format,
and there’s typically only one place to go get your music
from. Wanna switch devices? Kiss your library goodbye. Wanna
give a song to your sister? She better have the same player
as you, bubba.
Not only is this a monumental pain in the ass for the consumer
and a trap for the unwary, it is criminally anti-competitive.
The much beloved Apple iPod dominates the gizmo market and,
largely because of that, the iTunes store controls something
like 85 percent of the digital-download market. Don’t you
think online music would be cheaper if there were 10 stores
out there ready to fill up your iPod, not just one? And don’t
you think the incentive to go to the free sites to get “illegal”
music would be lessened if the legit market were less monolithic?
So all the French are trying to do is to get all of these
devices to just get along. If you own an iPod, or a Creative
player, or some zizzed-up cell-phone, the French think you
should be able to buy your music from any number of online
stores, and, once you own a song, you should be able to move
it around.
Makes sense to me. Mais non! Bonjour, le reality!
Apple, which has the most to lose at the moment, went predictably
berserk, screaming about government meddling with the free
market and calling the French proposal (which won’t actually
become law unless the upper house of French Parliament approves
is, and that won’t be until at least May) “state sanctioned
piracy.” I’m not exactly sure how they got there, but the
word being spread around is that this forced sharing of DRM
information will make it easier for bad people to strip the
digital protections off of the music files, and make it easier
for people to post and trade the files on the “illegal” sites.
It will make it easier for the music to be free, which as
we all know, it wants to be anyway.
Many commentators expect Apple will simply close its French
iTunes store, and the predicted result of this will be that
French music fans will then flock to the “illegal sites” to
get music for their beloved iPods.
Mon
Dieu!
The
problem with these threats and dire predictions, of course,
is that all of this precious music is already on the
illegal sites, and French music fans, like music fans everywhere,
are already flocking to them. Illegal downloads outnumber
paid downloads by something like 80 to 1. The legal-download
space, as an industry, has an incredible uphill battle in
front of it. And it’s not going to win by internecine warfare,
by screwing around with consumer’s choices, and by continued
monopoly pricing.
The French are on to something here, and rumor has it that
other EU countries are looking hard at the issue as well.
I hope they don’t back down from all the high-tech saber rattling.
They just might teach us all something about competition and
freedom.
Merci,
mon cyber-freres!
—Paul
Rapp
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