Is it just me, or is this like someone buying a CD and saying 'THIS WON"T WORK WITH MY 8-TRACK PLAYER! I WANT TO SUE YOU!' iTunes Music Store is to purchase music to listen to on your PC or on your iPod, and soon to be on your Apple TV appliance as well. If you bought it under any other pretences you are mistaken and that is your fault. You are allowed to burn it to a CD as an audio file if you want to as well. I do not think Apple's DRM scheme is all too restricting. If you don't have an iPod, there are plenty of other online stores in order to buy music for whateveryour choice in DAP is.

Stick it to them like a fork through lutefisk!

And in other news governments around the world sue Gillette because their razors won't work in non-Gillette handles.

it's too bad they never advertise the fact that these players dont operate as a UMS device. Hate players that spit up MTS too. Sony's ATRAC helped put anything that company makes in the doghouse for me :P Hope zune's marketplace gets hit too.

http://www.anythingbutipod.com/archives/2006/03/zdnet-thinks-that-d...

Surely there must be a snarky way to avoid this legal issue. Couldn't they just provide a "feature" in iTunes to re-compress a protected AAC file into a protected WMA file? Then you could play your iTunes music on other devices (it would just sound crappy).

To cover the costs of WMA licensing, they could raise the price of iTunes tracks in Norway.

Sucks to be Apple right now.

There are actually other major issues that the consumer ombudsman has raised:

* iTunes license which says that Apple can unilaterally alter the terms of use
* Currently, Apple claims that it has no liability, but the consumer groups want Apple to take responsibility for content sold through iTunes.
* the groups want to make sure that any disputes with iTunes are resolved according to the laws of the country where the dispute arises. Currently, iTunes Europe is based in Luxembourg, and its terms of service say that all users agree to be bound by English law.

Source: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070124-8695.html

Any one of those is more than enough to raise attention from consumer groups in Europe.

Apple need to license the technology.

It doesn't need to be an open licensing scheme, they can pick who they'll sell to - in this case it'll be a subset of MadeForiPod licensees I'm sure, and there will be a licensing fee on top.

Otherwise it will be just like as if Philips had never licensed the CD format. Good initial uptake, but someone will make something better eventually. Look at how other media formats succeeded, such as Minidisk (which was licensed, but too late) and UMD.

Apple would do well to look at the example set by Sony here. License the damned DRM, because it isn't the worst DRM out there. You've had a few years of exclusivity to establish the format...

apple could do well with itunes just being in the american market alone.
they can afford to screw the europeans.

who buys from itunes anyway? I thought everyone downloaded pirated mp3s.... Europe has a huge pirated downloads community

oh come on! your not forced to use anything related to iCr@p. a 13 year old could easily find a program on the web that bypasses itunes to dump their music on their iCr@p in a day or two. In other words, it will probably take ten times that length for an adult to figure it out.

Manufacturers of music devices are free to create their own iTunes-like application.

Apple does not need to make accommodations for other companies.

I'm not a big apple supporter but they should just put a disclaimer on their website that the service is not available for Europeans. ;P