Wise Buddha

For a while the French have been laying into Apple as they are unhappy with the fact that songs purchased on iTunes will only play on iPod’s. The French not unreasonably argue that if you buy music from legitimate sources you should be able to play your songs on whatever player you want to.
Apple on the other hand have been throwing around phrases such as ‘State sponsored piracy’ so my guess is that they aren’t too keen on compatibility across different devices - having said that France has just passed a law that may just be the starting point for a movement toward convergence and standardized DRM. That plus the millions of iTunes customers when they realize sometime soon that all the hundreds of songs they bought can’t be played on that shiny new non iPod device. Read about the French decision here.