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French pass diluted DRM bill
Country's parliament must now compromise on a weakened version of a proposal to require interoperability among digital music services in the country.
Apple might not be vacating the French digital music market after all.
The French Senate passed an amended version of a controversial digital music bill yesterday, addressing the country's desire for interoperability among legal digital music services but adding layers to it that will make it easier for the iPod/iTunes juggernaut to retain its use of the digital rights management (DRM) technology that restricts what a user can do with legally downloaded music.
The amended bill keeps the goal of interoperability, but does so with slightly less teeth than the original version passed by the French House last month. Apple equated the original bill to "state-sponsored piracy" and received the support of US Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez.
The bill's original intent was to create a system whereby the proprietary formats of digital music services like Apple's iTunes and Sony's Connect would be forced open. As of now, for instance, music bought from the iTunes Music Store cannot be played on anything but an iPod.
Many industry experts have said that the lack of interoperability has been the monumental roadblock that has really kept the digital music market from exploding. Earlier this week, Sony said that it was adding playback capability for songs ripped into Apple's AAC file format into its music management software.
The amended French bill added in some layers that will likely make it easier for companies to comply without opening their respective DRM.
Under the Senate's new version, a company that agrees to provide these codes will receive a license fee as compensation along with guarantees that the transfer of information will not weaken its copyright protection measures.
"We have to ensure that interoperability does not open the doors to abuse," a Senate representative, who did not wish to be identified, told Reuters on Thursday.
The bill adds a new regulatory agency--the Authority for the Regulation of Technical Measures--that would mediate consumer requests to open the respective DRM codes.
The key addition to the bill is the criteria the new agency would use to decide whether to order companies to share the technological details of their DRM schemes with competitors. That decision will come directly from the copyright holder--that is, the major labels and publishers that retain the copyrights to music sold at download stores like iTunes, Napsters, and Rhapsody.
That means that Apple, for instance, would only need to prove that its proprietary DRM is being used with the consent of the copyright holder in order to avoid having to open the DRM to competitors. Those copy protection terms are typically part of the distribution contracts that labels sign with stores like iTunes.
The amended bill kept most of the provisions in the original: vastly reduced penalties for piracy, and required software makers to give the French government details of their DRM.
A compromise over the respective House and Senate bills is expected to be worked out in committee in the next few weeks. The bill would then go to President Jacques Chirac for his signature.
Had the bill passed in its original form, many analysts expected companies like Apple to vacate the French market in an effort to avoid opening up its proprietary FairPlay DRM to competitors.
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