"France's lower house of parliament passed a law on Tuesday that could challenge Apple Computer Inc.'s dominance of the online digital music market by making it open its iTunes store to portable music players other than Apple iPods." reports Reuters.
"The new legislation would require that online music retailers such as iTunes provide the software codes that protect copyrighted material -- known as digital rights management (DRM) -- to allow the conversion from one format to another."
Comment: There's some speculation that, if the law is approved by the Senate, Apple might withdraw from the French market. But that would be silly. Apple makes its money selling iPods, and the other side of the coin is that Apple could probably sell more iPods if it shipped them able to read Microsoft's DRM as well as its own. (Not much effort needed there: Apple bought in the iPod technology and Portal Player's chips support Microsoft's DRM as standard.) Any music sales it might lose to iPod owners using, say, Napster 2.0, should be more than covered by, say, Creative Labs and Sony player owners buying music from the iTunes Music Store.
And if iTMS is already both the market leader and the best store out there, why should Apple be afraid of facing competition?
