World of Apple

The French Senate has been at it again, on Wednesday the Senate approved a new copyright bill but has amended the previous bill affecting music services such as iTunes, forcing them to open up their DRM.

The amended text in the bill which was approved retains the idea of DRM interoperability but inserts a loophole allowing companies to keep their DRM systems secret.

With the amended bill comes a new regulatory authority, the authority will have power to order companies to share details of their DRM, but companies should be able to refuse as long as the DRM systems only limit usage of content in an approved manner.

The NBA and Apple have teamed up to bring the NBA 2006 Playoffs to the iTunes Music Store.

Inside the NBA by TNT, the awarding winning show.

15 to 20 minute recaps will be available for each of the Playoff games and during The Finals fans will be will be able to purchase complete game replays of every game the day after they air.

In addition to this TNT Sports will provide more than 15 Episodes of its Award-winning show featuring exclusive footage.

“We’re thrilled to be offering basketball fans this unique opportunity to follow NBA Playoffs on iTunes,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of iTunes. “With the new ‘Follow Your Team’ feature, fans automatically receive full game recaps of every game their favorite team plays from the Conference Semifinals through The Finals.”

Episodes of of “Inside the NBA on TNT” will be available for $8.99 while game recaps and The Finals replays will be available for $1.99 with 24 hours of the games conclusion.

Apple has today added Fox shows to the iTunes Music Store, 24, Prison Break, Unan1mous and Stacked have all been added to the store.

As well as the first seasons of Buffy, Slayer, Firefly and Lost in Space.

On Monday Apple revealed it had renewed contracts with the big four, it comes as a win to Apple as the record companies were pushing for a variable pricing scheme but the contracts reportedly still stick to a static pricing scheme.

No one from the four record labels was available to comment.

“The issue has occasionally become acrimonious, with Mr Jobs last year publicly labelling the industry ‘greedy,’ Apple and the music companies declined to comment on the current round of negotiations. However, several music executives privately acknowledge that they have little leverage over Mr Jobs,” Chaffin and Kevin Allison report for the Financial Times.

Apple today quietly slipped two new features into the US iTunes Music Store.

The Commercial Success logo on the US iTunes Music Store

The first being “Commercial Success.” Currently featuring 26 songs from recent commercials including Apple, Old Navy, Budweiser, Jaguar, AT&T, Cingular, Motorola, Dockers, Diet Coke, Candies, Honda, Hilton, Citibank, Nike and more.

The second is “As Heard On” which makes it easy to download songs from American Idol. The feature allows users to scroll between the weeks of the show to download a particular song.

Coinstar the coin counting company is letting customers exchange spare coins for iTunes Music Store gift cards.

The “Coin to Card” scheme is available on 5,000 Coinstar machines in the US and unlike normal coin-to-cash services which usually charge a processing fee customers of “Coin to Card” will forgo the 8.9 percent fee.

The machines can deliver an iTunes Music Store gift card to a denomination as small as $5 which is unavailable directly from Apple.

Word is out that The Beatles catalog is being digitally re-mastered and will appear on online digital download stores.

With the recent legal actions between Apple Computer and Beatles Catalog owners Apple Corps, it is unknown whether the catalog will become available on iTunes.

Neil Aspinall said the following, last week at the London High Court;

“We’re remastering the whole Beatles catalog, just to make it sound brighter and better and getting proper booklets to go with each of the packages. I think it would be wrong to offer downloads of the old masters when I am making new masters. It would be better to wait and try to do them both simultaneously so that you then get the publicity of the new masters and the downloading, rather than just doing it ad hoc.”

Warners and Apple have made the brand new Red Hot Chilli Peppers album, “Stadium Arcadium” exclusively available through iTunes.

The album can be pre-ordered for £14.99 ($19.90) and available for download on May 9, but customers will receive “Dani California” the single immediately after they pre-order, Apple have also teamed up with Ticketmaster to offer a special concert ticket for the upcoming Chill Peppers tour.

“The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ fans are going to love the combination of music, video and even concert tickets available on the iTunes Music Store,” said Tom Whalley, chairman and CEO of Warner Bros. “This is the first Red Hot Chili Peppers album in over three years and we think music fans are going to be delighted with what we’ve done with Apple.”

“This is an incredible offering for fans of the Red Hot Chili Peppers,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of iTunes. “We’ve put together a package that’s unrivalled in the music industry for launching a new album, exclusive videos and a concert tour.”

Red Hot Chili Peppers’ fans who pre-order the album on iTunes will also receive an email with a code that they can use at Ticketmaster.com from May 9 to purchase concert tickets before they go on sale to the general public on May 13.

Apple is continuing to offer more video content via the iTunes Music Store, it now offers a 21-video clip collection of Tori Amos as a complete digital set.

‘The Tori Amos Video Collection: Fade to Red’ (UK) is a set of 21 videos that cost £1.89 ($1.99) per video or alternatively you can by the whole collection for £14.99 ($24.99), the DVD retails in the UK for £19.99.

Eddie Cue, head of iTunes described video sales as a “natural fit”. He also went on to say; “Over time there is no reason why we can’t have a vingle for every video,” He said. “Not every song has a video, but every video has a song.”

Yahoo! News has been today reporting that French parliamentarians are hoping to push through a law that could open the iTunes Music Store to anyone and every device or worse close it down completely.

The new law would allow consumers to be able to legally use software to convert content into any format.

It would no longer be illegal to crack digital rights management — the codes that protect music, films and other content — if it is to enable to the conversion from one format to another

The law would allow songs bought from the iTunes Music Store to be freely distributed to any device, but it is widely expected that Apple would simply close the store to prevent such activities.

[Update 1] Yesterday French delegates allowed iTunes to escape French Authors Rights Law, which could have prevented iTunes from operating using DRM in France. However amendments to the bill have allowed distributors to freely associate DRM on music sold online.