Pendant ce temps-là, aux USA:
La partie sur l'interopérabilité nécessaire est applaudie par la presse informatique comme un camouflet fait à Apple et une lutte contre les monopoles
How France is saving civilization
New legislation in France would force Apple Computer to open the iPod and iTunes to competitors -- and that's a good thing for consumers, in the long run.
On Tuesday, the French parliament passed a law that would require digital content bought at any online store to be playable on any hardware. The law would be applicable to all hardware and service providers, but the immediate impact would be on Apple and iTunes, and may prompt the company to withdraw from France.
To many, France's move seems patently unfair to Apple.
The company created the market for legal music downloads, why shouldn't it dominate it? Why should the French government help competitors like Microsoft or Sony to get a foothold in a market they have proven incapable of competing in? And why should Apple be subject to antimonopoly legislation when rivals like Microsoft traditionally have not? To free marketers, it's government meddling at its worst.
But French legislators aren't just looking at Apple. They're looking ahead to a time when most entertainment is online, a shift with profound consequences for consumers and culture in general. French lawmakers want to protect the consumer from one or two companies holding the keys to all of its culture, just as Microsoft holds the keys to today's desktop computers.
"It is unacceptable that ... the key should be controlled by a monopoly. France is against monopolies," Martin Rogard, an adviser at the French Culture Ministry, told Financial Times. "The consumer must be able to listen to the music they have bought on no matter what platform."
Apple may not qualify as a literal monopoly -- there are lots of ways to get music and buying online accounts for only a small fraction of total music sales. But the sliver it does control it controls almost completely, and it's not out of the question to suggest that this sliver will ultimately become the only way people will buy music in the future.
Apple's head start is not to be dismissed lightly.
The FairPlay copy-protection mechanism in iTunes and the iPod was Hollywood's idea. Apple initially balked at copy protection, but as the iPod and iTunes took off, the company realized FairPlay had an important secondary function: It locked iPod users into the online iTunes Music Store, and iTunes music buyers into the iPod.
This kind of vendor lock-in is a time-honored business practice in the tech industry, and is the exact same tactic successfully employed by Microsoft to build an illegal monopoly in desktop computers.
It's early days yet, and this may be premature, but Apple may become the Microsoft of the digital entertainment era.
Music and movies are fast transforming from the old analog formats to new digital ones. Every sale of a big plasma TV or music download is another step toward the digital entertainment future when all music and movies are routed through PCs or PC-like appliances like a TiVo box.
Apple's iTunes and its underlying QuickTime software is already popular, and with every iPod sale, the software is installed on another computer, usually a Windows machine. Each installation is a beachhead that allows Apple to route around Microsoft's desktop monopoly -- and the living room monopoly of the cable TV providers.
Apple has several toes in the living room door, but the most intriguing play could be the Mac mini -- the little box refreshed a few weeks ago with Intel chips. The mini would be a perfect living room media box, some say, if only it could record and play back TV shows like a TiVo or one of Microsoft's Media Center PCs.
In fact, Apple may be one step ahead. Why would the mini need to record TV shows when it can be used to go online and order them from the iTunes Music Store instead?
Already the iTunes store has dozens of popular TV shows and, as of last week, its first full-length movie. So Apple, more so than any other company I can think of, is poised to extend its proprietary digital rights management to a whole new category of media -- on-demand video downloads.
Surely, this is the model of TV in the future. Shows are made available when the consumer wants to watch them, rather than on a rigid, inflexible broadcast schedule.
It's already happening. I'm a Comcast subscriber, and I no longer tape The Sopranos or Deadwood because I can get them on demand, whenever I like, through my cable box/DVR.
It's easy and convenient, and it saves on hard-drive space, but there are definite downsides: I can't save the shows, nor can I easily load them onto a laptop to watch on a plane or burn them to DVD for archiving. Most of the shows are unavailable after the season concludes.
These restrictions are purposeful, of course, and not just to protect against digital piracy. HBO doesn't want these shows on BitTorrent, but it also doesn't want them recorded at home because this would harm DVD sales, a very big part of the TV business.
So it may be convenient for me to get shows on demand, but this comes at a price. My TV is tied intimately to the Comcast DVR box I rent, and I lose some of my consumer rights (saving shows, watching them on a different device) so that the entertainment industry can protect its old business models.
Enter Apple, which may soon strike deals with the TV networks and video production houses that will see hundreds of TV shows, documentaries, music videos and so on, hosted on an iTunes music and movie store -- accessed only though Apple's software or hardware, like the Mac mini.
If such a scenario comes true, Apple will become more and more powerful as the gatekeeper to this content. And it will behave like every other big, powerful global corporation -- as a predatory monopoly.
There are few Mac users prepared to argue that Microsoft's monopoly in desktop PCs has been a good thing for the technology industry; why would an Apple monopoly of digital entertainment be any different?
Vive la France.
Une voie pour la promotion de formats de DRM ouverts et libres?
On peut toujours rêver...
Regards,
Skro
