"Government consumer protection agencies in Norway and Sweden want Apple to remove restrictions that prevent customers from playing music they bought through iTunes on devices made by other companies. And in Britain, one of the largest digital music markets, the British recording industry's trade association, known as BPI, told a Parliamentary committee on Tuesday that iTunes music should be made compatible with other portable music devices. It was the first time the group had taken a public stance on the issue," reports the International Herald Tribune.
Bjorn Erik Thon, director of the consumers ombudsman's office in Norway, said that he himself had bought a large number of songs from iTunes for about 1 euro apiece, and now wanted to transfer them to his new Nokia N80 cellular phone, but could not.
"I just cannot imagine an argument in favor of stopping someone from using a song they purchased," he said.
He dismissed the claim Apple has often made that its policy helps combat copyright violation. "They are not protecting against piracy, but instead encouraging it," Mr Thon said. "When consumers cannot copy an iTunes song onto their mobile phone, they will get a download of it free from Napster."
Comment: Napster is now a paid-for service, of course, but you know what he means. But it's not clear how you could give consumers the facility to run any music file on any device without interoperable digital rights management (DRM). In other words, transcoding a track from something like AAC/FairPlay to wma will also have to retain the DRM or replace it with something equivalent -- and the process will need to be virtually automatic.
Otherwise, Mr Thon could have said: "Hey, it's usually easy to move tunes to your phone: you just burn a CD and rip that to MP3 or whatever. Gets rid of that pesky DRM, too!"
