France to pass law requiring open digital music
 

Apple vs. France

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Interesting, either this will harm the DRM in place on itunes' files or Apple will abandon france.

France is a strange place.

Yes, but this is the first of their new laws that actually makes sense.

Thank god.

Still trying to figure that part out. The good in it is none of the music services much less record labels and hardware makers will likely ever agree on a standard of DRM technology. Bad thing is if they do they could force everyone to use it.

Might be good, might be bad. At least their fries are tasty.

I don't think the real diffences in the ways music are stored in digital media makes much difference. This law would make the standards whatever they were non propritary and open. It isn't uncommon to have players that play a variety of formats as it is. That could be MP3, Ogg etc. Since encryption wouldn't be useful anymore, it would dissappear.

It would sure open up the door for a competition in creating new players, as it effectively says that these patents of the formats are moot :)

This is a step in the right direction for the consumer.

I believe that the most likely solution would be Apple licencing their DRM, in France, to other providers. It's unlikely that DRM being removed will happen, unfortunately.

true but once the code for their DRM is available to more people the sooner it will be leaked/hacked/disabled/etc..

And with a DRM which had zero effectivity what would be the point of bothering. It's sorta like DVDs are now. You couldn't really describe them as being copy protected at all, even though legally they are. Copy protection that doesn't protect anything is sort of a waste of software.

Who said anything about opening the code? All they have to do is provide a black box which does the DRM functions, like the one that Microsoft provide for their system.