A little while ago, a friend forwarded to me a note about Steve Jobs making a plea to the big four record companies to authorize sales of mp3s, free of drm. I read the headlines of the Paris papers (to practice French, and to see what makes it to front page in France), and this is in at the moment: Le Monde.fr : S. Jobs (Apple) plaide pour des telechargements de musique sans protection. It says "Steve Jobs pleads for downloads of music without protection." Front page of Le Monde, a major Paris paper. An important point of Jobs' article was that 2 1/2 of the 4 labels are owned by European (including Britain) companies, and Europeans are complaining the most about the problem with interoperability of music downloads and portable players.
Earlier this year there was a big meeting of the major labels in Europe and several notes about this subject drifted out from that meeting, as I mentioned in earlier blog posts here. More signs that this could be the year the dam bursts.
