Its looks like Apple is heading for a show down over its refusal to license their "fairplay" DRM, the monopoly the company currently enjoys has been attacked as anti consumer.
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/17510The country’s consumer ombudsman Erik Thon gave Apple until November 3 to respond to demands that it break the exclusive link [read DRM] between its iPod music player and iTunes iPod loader, p2pnet posted in September. Response from Apple? Zip.
Now, “Norway has made it official,” says the iPod Observer. Thon will, “take Apple to court, or to the ‘Market Council,’ to be more precise, over Apple’s refusal to open up FairPlay to third party digital media devices.
“The announcement follows the passing of a November 3rd deadline that Mr. Thon had given Apple to comply with his country’s demand that Apple open up iTunes downloads to all players.”
Unless Apple gets its act together and dumps the DRM, “(at least for Norway), it’ll be subject to fines in the six figure.
Lets hope that a fine or two will soften Apples selfish stand on this, its no secret that by removing the DRM function from the low quality (128k) audio tracks they sell sales of their top selling Iplod would likely start to drop, they are after all just an MP3 player with a fancy finish.
