Will Apple be forced to licence its DRM?

THE PROSPECT OF Apple being forced to license its Fairplay DRM is looking ever more likely as the cellular industry focuses in on music downloads.

The music industry itself is predicting that downloads to mobile phones could account for some 20 to 25 per cent of all digital music sales by 2010. We've already seen a ringtone, the Crazy Frog's version of Axel F, top the British charts for three weeks.

Now cellular infrastructure expert, Ericsson, has allied with the Napster download service to market music download services to the mobile network operators.

The service which all the handset manufacturers want to tap into is, of course, Apple's iTunes. There are already handsets such as the forthcoming X2 from Sendo which support all the necessary music formats (including AAC and AAC+) for users to play whatever tracks they want.

The catch is that Apple's DRM scheme - Fairplay - prevents users from downloading their iTunes to mobile phones. Sendo's Ron Schaeffer told the INQ that he's already asked Apple to license the technology but with no success to date.

Apple's Achilles heel is that it has already licensed the technology to one handset vendor - Motorola. This has led to at least one French consumer group, UFC-Que Choisir, launching a legal action that argues Apple is stopping consumers from choosing the products they want to buy.

Apple's action apparently, "constitutes a significant restraint on the free circulation of creative works." Given that the EU has forced Microsoft to sell Windows without the Media player such an action might bear fruit.

More tangible is the fear that Napster will steal a quarter of the potential market if Ericsson successfully markets its service to cellular operators. Plus there's another incentive.

Rumours are circulating that software that breaks Apple's DRM is already in existence and consumers may well be tempted to take the matter into their own hands and hack their own iTunes libraries. µ