Once, Apple had a dream. That dream was to bring power to the people and give them a better choice, saving them from the darkness of the command line. Today, more and more people become their faithful followers, and things would be just fine, if some matters were treated a bit differently by the Cupertino-based company...

Earlier this week, France and Germany joined the anti-Apple action that began in Scandinavia, powered by the Nordic consumer groups. To cut a longer story short, the problem is that Apple's business practices are considered to be anti-competitive, since music that you buy from iTunes Online Music Store can only be played by PCs or iPods, but to get it ready to play on other digital players you have to download, burn, rip the burnt CD, and only then, load it to your media player. Not a really fast process, is it?

Now, I just found out that the Consumer Ombudsman in Norway ruled that Apple's DRM policy concerning iPod and iTunes is illegal. Just as simple as that! Torgier Waterhouse, senior advisor at the Consumer Council, said to Out-Law.com that "It doesn't get any clearer than this. Fairplay is an illegal lock-in technology whose main purpose is to lock the consumers to the total package provided by Apple by blocking interoperability."

Apart from accusing Apple of blocking interoperability, "one the most important building blocks in a well functioning digital society", the Ombudsman also backs up the claim that the DRM technology is more than just a copy protection scheme, since the Consumer Council argues that such a strict restriction to consumer's freedom of using the music they legally purchase breaks the regulations contained in the Norwegian Marketing Control Act.

Although an Apple spokesman said earlier this week that they are looking forward to solve these issues "as quickly as possible", I think that Apple should hurry up with this, since there are not many choices available. First of all - and the easiest solution - would be to simply drop DRM usage, the second is to license Fairplay to any other manufacturer that wants iTunes songs to play on its devices and finally, the hardest solution of all, in my opinion, is to develop an open standard working together with other companies.

No matter what they choose, they should choose quickly. Be sure that I'll keep an eye on the evolution of this European battle against DRM and I'll let you know as soon as something new comes up!