From IDG (via Yahoo!):

Apple has accused France of “state-sponsored piracy” in reaction to a proposed law that would allow iTunes users to play their music on devices other than iPods.

Apple’s harsh words follow the initial passage of legislation in France on Tuesday that, if passed by a second legislative body, would ultimately force companies to sell digital music that is compatible with any music player. Currently, songs bought on Apple’s popular iTunes online music store can only be played on Apple’s iPod music players.

If the law passes, “legal music sales will plummet just when legitimate alternatives to piracy are winning over customers,” the company said. Free movies would follow close behind, the company asserted, “in what will rapidly become a state-sponsored culture of piracy.”

Apple also predicted that iPod sales would increase, because customers could load their players with music that can’t be protected, including music from illegal sources.

There is really almost no limit to the number of different ways that you can be wrong about digital rights management. France’s approach puts them on the road to being wrong in a whole new way - insisting on a remedy that is usually reserved for monopolistic antitrust cases with the unfortunate side effect of blowing apart the first security scheme that has come even remotely close to making artists and consumers and media companies happy.

So - nicely done, France! Over here, we have the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and other fun provisions that give all the rights to record companies, studios and other intellectual landlords. That’s swell in a whole different way, because it allows media companies to sell you, for example, unplayable CD’s without proper warning. [You might remember my adventures with that, earlier this year…]

See? There you have both sides of the issue, both ways a government could go at this stuff, and they both hit me as intuitively wrong. There are other flavors, too. There’s the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who believe that your only real intellectual property is your brain itself (and even that should be made available for consumers’ and for any other artist who might, for instance, want to place your cerebrum at the center of an installation…). There the Recording Industry Association of America, unsleeping in their quest to put toddlers behind bars and meter the number of times a song is allowed to run through your head.

What does every approach to managing digital media have in common? Two thing as far as I can tell.

1) The musicians get screwed.
- This, at least, is something you can count on. Whether you’re talking about the recording industry’s rich history of exploitative contracts that ensure that new artists will take all the risks and earn nothing unless they become superstars… or the consumer advocates who believe that the song you just wrote wants to be free… either way, musicians are gonna get screwed. That’s oddly comforting, in a way, isn’t it?

2) It’s wrong!
- As I’ve said above, there are no solutions that feel right in all situations. We all think schoolchildren should be allowed to hum tunes without being immediately tackled and pinned by an FCC assault team. We all think that any actual peg-legged, parrot-and-eyepatch-wearing, schooner-skippering, “aarrrg!”-yelling pirates who board shipping vessels, steal new CDs and sell ‘em at illicit West Indies retail outfits ought to be stopped. But between those extremes… nothing seems quite right.

Please feel free to suggest any solutions in the Comments below. The world will thank you. Just make sure that your idea doesn’t involve paying musicians for their work, okay? We all need some continuity in our lives.