The French parliament approved a compromise version of a controversial copyright bill that would have forced DRM technology providers to interoperate with one another. The approved version is close to that of the Sénat (upper house), which weakens the interoperability requirements almost to the point of pointlessness.
As we reported previously, this bill puts decisions about interoperability into the hands of media companies who license their material for use over online services from firms like Apple, Loudeye, Musiwave, and others in France. It establishes a new regulatory authority to hear requests for interoperability, which effectively can only come from rights holders -- not from consumers or their advocates -- and can only be for interoperability with services that will not offer looser rights.
If the French parliament's original intent with this legislation was to break the Apple iTunes monopoly over online content, then the resulting bill is actually counterproductive. First of all, if content owners are not happy with interoperability features of a certain DRM technology, they can negotiate such features during content licensing discussions. This bill effectively enables a clear market leader like Apple to demand that content owners agree not to petition the regulatory authority for interoperability. Given how successful Apple has been in rebuffing the music industry's other licensing requests -- such as variable per-track pricing -- this is how matters will likely proceed. (Nevertheless, Apple appears less than happy about the outcome of this legislative process.)
On the other hand, it is possible that content owners may successfully launch interoperability complaints toward services over which they have more leverage -- meaning those that include DRM from Microsoft, the OMA DRM standard, or SDC. Will this require that Microsoft make its DRM interoperable with iTunes and iPods? Hardly likely, although service providers that use Windows Media DRM could accomplish something similar by emulating RealNetworks, which clean-room reverse engineered Apple's file format. Anything further would require cooperation from Apple.
Consumer advocates in Scandinavian countries, emboldened by the French legislation, have been pushing for similar reforms in their own countries. This legislation gives them precious little to work with.
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