Norway declares iTunes illegal
Apple was dealt the first of most likely many blows on Wednesday as Norway’s ombudsman ruled that their itunes online music store was illegal.
This stance comes about because songs downloaded from itunes won’t work on rival mp3 players, they will only work with an Apple iPod. It therefore goes against consumer protection laws. This is the case in most European countries and my hunch says this just might be the beginning as other countries will look to follow suit. Sweden and Finland have infact already given their support to Norway but have yet to take legal action.
The Norweigan Ombudsman has set a deadline of October 1, far too long in my opinion, for Apple to comply with regulation and make their songs playable in any device. If it fails to to do, they will eventually face closure by court action.
Torgeir Waterhouse, senior adviser to the Norwegian Consumer Council said: “We are satisfied the Federation of German Consumer Organisations and the French UFC Que Choisir are addressing this important issue. It means that iTunes is now being told by more than 100m European consumers to offer them a fair deal,” he said.
I’m glad someone has finally decided to do something about this. My wife had her eye on an eyepod shuffle for christmas but I didn’t want to buy it for many reasons aside from those mentioned above:
The itunes software is buggy and horrible to use. It doesn’t support WMA files which are smaller files that still hold the same quality as a larger mp3. Therefore you can’t fit as many songs onto your player.
I chose to go with a white Creative Zen Nano in the end. It’s so user friendly, and you can use it as a usb memory key to store other files on. I would highly recommend them over an iPod anything.
on August 14th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
Consumer protection… haha I love it. Removing people’s options is always good for the consumer in Europe I guess.
Yes, iTunes sucks. Yes, it’s gay that you can’t put their music on another player. And so you want to take away people’s ability to use it even if they find that restriction acceptable?
You make me sick for supporting this.