Steve Jobs says France's decision to force him to in effect allow customers to use 'product' they buy from him on any player will promote piracy.

"The French implementation of the EU Copyright Directive will result in state-sponsored piracy,'' Apple said in an e-mailed statement, states Bloomberg News. "If this happens, legal music sales will plummet just when legitimate alternatives to piracy are winning over customers.''

Bloomberg's statement that "legitimate alternatives to piracy are winning over customers" is, of course, pure Big Four Organized Music cartel PR and in fact, the exact opposite is happening.

Hundreds of millions of people around the world are using independent sites and services, not to mention the p2p networks (see p2p research firm Big Champagne statistc on the left), and more go to them every day, driven there by the labels who, while they call their own customers criminals and thieves are themselves being investigated for price fixing and bribery.

Apple is already practicing corporate piracy via its CRAP DRM which stops people from making fair use of Apple downloads.

Yesterday French politicians voted 296 - 193 for a new copyright law. They'd previously approved changes to allow anyone in France to demand disclosures that will effectively end DRM. But Jobs won't have to abandon his CRAP altogether.

Rather, "It will be forced by courts to disclose every piece of information that will fully enable third party software to play tracks bought on iTunes," Ratiatum's Guillaume Champeau told p2pnet.

It won't, however, be legal to make downloads playable without respecting the rights restrictions, says Champeau: "For instance, free software could be created to play iTunes files, but you still won't be able to burn the results more than five times."

Meanwhile, "Apple and rivals such as Microsoft Corp. use different copy-protection software to prevent piracy, meaning song downloads from Apple's iTunes can't be played on Microsoft's Windows Media Player and Apple's iPod won't play songs in Microsoft's format," says Bloomberg News.

Of course, piracy has nothing to do with it. The idea is to stifle competition - to make buyers to use a particular product, and only that product, whether they like it or not.

If the bill becomes law, Apple will probably shut down its iTunes store in France rather than having to open up its music format to competitors and change its business model, Bloomberg News has analyst Jonathan Arber saying.

The bill still has to be cleared by France's Senate and as Champeau says, "They don't have a reputation of being very progressive, but sometimes they surprise us."

Also See:
Bloomberg News - Apple Says France's Copyright Bill Promotes Piracy, March 22, 2006
CRAP DRM - Apple and its C.R.A.P., March 4, 2006
fully enable - France votes on iPod Act, March 21, 2006