LWN: Comments on "iTunes runs into trouble in Norway"

iTunes runs into trouble in Norway

arny — 2006-06-22T20:33:40+00:00

> This is geographical discrimination of consumers, and an artificial
> barrier to trade. Both are at odds with EU free-competition law.

Last time I checked Norway hasn't been assimilated by us (EU).
Those stubborn Vikings...

Norway is not in the EU...

alextingle — 2006-06-22T20:14:48+00:00

...it's only a member of EFTA. Different rules apply.

Freedom to waive consumer protections

arcticwolf — 2006-06-22T09:14:21+00:00

There's no such thing as a law that forbids violating the law.

Try saying that out loud without laughing.

Or, to quote from "Airplane!": Shirley you can't be serious...

iTunes runs into trouble in Norway

kleptog — 2006-06-22T08:29:33+00:00

Maybe, but in any case I'm in Holland and I can't buy an Interrail ticket from the site mentioned either. In fact, looking at the two sites, they're not selling the same things. The RailEurope site doesn't mention Interrail at all. And the Interrail site doesn't sell Eurail passes. If he's saying that he can't buy a Eurail pass from RailEurope, then he may have a point, but that's not what he said.

As for warrenty, liability or VAT, obviously the location of the seller is what counts. That's not unreasonable, the buyer is allowed to discriminate, the seller is not. If you don't like the terms, buy from somewhere else.

The booze-cruises are simply an excellent example of the system working and buyers taking advantages of the situation. No-one is doing anything illegal and it encourages countries to get their acts together.

iTunes runs into trouble in Norway

Wol — 2006-06-22T07:24:58+00:00

But the OP here is talking about discrimination INSIDE the EU.

As a Brit, I should be able to go to *ANY* EU web site and buy stuff off it. Here he says that doesn't work for rail tickets. I'm inclined to agree that that is a breach of the Trade Directives.

There are problems, however, like liability etc. Are your legal rights that of your state, or the state of the vendor, or what? There's VAT problems on customer sales ... (think of the booze cruisers for a very good example :-)

The Free Market is badly distorted by taxes and stuff even within the EU. Until they sort that out, it'll be hard to have free and fair intra-EU cross-border trade.

Cheers,
Wol

Freedom to waive consumer protections

Wol — 2006-06-22T07:18:25+00:00

Actually, even in the UK it is possible for a consumer to waive consumer protection law BUT the retailer has to cover themselves pretty comprehensively to do so.

The usual approach is to sell stock as damaged or second-user, and say that it is "as seen". All of which is a major tip-off to the consumer that the goods quite possibly may be faulty.

Even there, there are liabilities you can't disclaim - for example it is illegal to sell a non-roadworthy vehicle unless you explicitly point out that fact to the buyer. If you didn't tell the buyer because you didn't know, then sorry, you're liable.

Cheers,
Wol

Freedom to waive consumer protections

giraffedata — 2006-06-20T03:15:12+00:00

It's fundamentally the same in the US, but I sense from your wording a difference in degree -- i.e. Europe leans more socialist.

Throughout the US, a consumer has the power to waive even the warranty that merchandise is usable for its normal purpose. And consumers do that a lot. But a consumer is not able to waive the warranty on an automobile against injury-causing defects.

And under US law, "merchants" have considerably more power to negotiate than "consumers." A merchant, BTW, isn't just someone who sells something -- it's basically defined as someone who should know what he's doing because he's in business. "Consumer" is essentially the modern word for "peasant."

Freedom to waive consumer protections

jschrod — 2006-06-19T10:51:58+00:00

The situation in many (all?) European states: There are some rights that end-consumers can not waive. E.g., you cannot waive your right for warranty in Germany. If a seller puts a waiver statement in a contract, that contract is void, or at least that part of the contract is void. ``puts a waiver statement'' is broadly meant. This might mean that he tells something in spoken communication, verbal contracts are still contracts (they are just harder to prove).

This is different for business-to-business contracts. Businesses (and also natural persons that make some contract as part of their own business, e.g., freelancers) can waive almost all rights. There are some exceptions, mostly concerning raciscm and equal opportunities. And waiving one's rights is regularly done, e.g., in consulting jobs. There is a vast difference between B2B and B2C contract law, and it is one where it's very easy to do things wrong, as a company's owner.

Cheers, Joachim

Exelent news

cstanhop — 2006-06-18T16:49:49+00:00

Also emusic.com provides for unencumbered mp3s.

--
Charles

iTunes runs into trouble in Norway

kleptog — 2006-06-18T11:31:33+00:00

AIUI, competition law in the EU merely forbids differentiating between different coutries within Europe (the single market idea). So you can't charge someone in Finland a different price than someone in France. I don't think it has anything to say about discriminating EU vs non-EU.

Doing that would almost amount to forbidding any kind of discrimiation at all. But that's obviously silly, since you may not want to sell stuff to Africa or Asia, but you're not allowed to refuse to sell to a fellow European (for purely geographical reasons).

Freedom to waive consumer protections

fergal — 2006-06-17T10:33:24+00:00

I think (2) could be a reference to contract law. When I covered it in business class, a long, long time ago, there was a list of ways in which a contract can be broken or made null. If the contract requires one of the parties to do something illegal then that part of the contract (or maybe even the enitre contract) is null and void and unenforceable.

Ombudsman

giraffedata — 2006-06-17T00:39:33+00:00

You go, Ombudsman. How come we don't have one of them here in the land of the formerly free?

I don't know exactly what this Ombudsman is, but from the article, it sounds a lot like what exists in the offices of attorneys general and district attorneys (two kinds of public prosecutors) throughout the US.

Freedom to waive consumer protections

giraffedata — 2006-06-17T00:24:38+00:00

I've read some comments about this (mainly from americans) that go something like this: "If you don't like the deal, don't take it", what they fail to realize is that we have consumer protection laws that: 1) Forbid unreasonable and misleading terms. 2) Forbid circumventing the law, even by contract.

I really doubt they fail to realize that, since the argument makes sense even so, and because such laws are rampant in the U.S.

(1) is two very different things -- unreasonable terms and misleading terms. I don't think anyone says, "if you don't like misleading terms, don't agree to them," since you can't know that they're misleading. But as for unreasonable terms, the freedom to agree or not agree, at your own option, even to terms others find unreasonable is a freedom that's really important to some people. People in the more capitalist countries seem to value it more than people in more socialist ones.

By the way, in case anyone didn't follow why my right to accept restrictions on myself is valuable to me: Sometimes, someone will offer me something in exchange for committing to those restrictions, and I find that something more valuable than what I'm giving up. For example, Apple might offer to give me a song for $1 that can play only on an Ipod, that Apple would demand $5 for in an open format.

(2) is nonense. There's no such thing as a law that forbids violating the law. Maybe you're referring to the fact that some laws specifically say they just define the default deal and two people are free to explicitly set up different terms, while others (plentiful in the US too) say they define the only deal allowed. The first kind are hard for anyone to object to, but the second kind are exactly the ones that lead those objecters to say, "If you don't like the deal, don't take it."

There are, though, good arguments for eliminating freedom to waive consumer protections. Basically, these two:

It protects people who don't have the skill to negotiate a good deal for themselves (maybe I don't realize how oppressive the Ipod-only thing is going to be).
It protects consumers from competition with other consumers. (As long as I'm OK with Ipod-only music, you probably won't be able to get any other kind).

iTunes runs into trouble in Norway

ekj — 2006-06-16T09:04:14+00:00

I think you're rigth. There's a lot of artificial barriers erected by companies wishing to sell the same product to different customers for different prices.

Many of these are, under my understanding of EU-law, illegal. The question is if they'll be cracked down upon in practice. The DVD-CSS is *also* used to be able to sell the same movie in different markets at different price-points and different release-dates, for example.

iTMS DRM removable?

ronaldcole — 2006-06-15T23:32:33+00:00

JHymn can't grokk Apple's 6.0 DRM. Says so right on the JHymn site. So I guess one needs to look to SharpMusique for all your iTunes shopping needs.

iTunes runs into trouble in Norway

thomask — 2006-06-15T22:15:28+00:00

This is geographical discrimination of consumers, and an artificial barrier to trade. Both are at odds with EU free-competition law.

That's interesting. As a citizen of the UK, I am not permitted to buy an inter-rail ticket for Europe from http://www.raileurope.com/ - only from http://www.interrail.co.uk/. Interestingly, the price difference for a youth ticket valid for 1 month seems to be $525 USD (£285) for Europeans versus $634 for non-Europeans. IANAL, but it looks as if by the same principle this would be against EU free-competition law too. On the other hand, perhaps EU competition law is crafted in such a way that companies within the EU must always benefit. As if the EU's protectionist schemes hadn't done enough harm already...

Exelent news

Frej — 2006-06-15T17:55:49+00:00

About the Russian site..
The Danish ministry of culture(?) actually said it wasn't illegal for the consumer to buy stuff there
since the site to the consumer looks legit (or something like that). (To be honest i don't the the
prices look legit). Who knows :/

The ministry actually removed a link to a group called APG (Anti piracy group) which is basically a
cover for the Danish music industry. Think RIAA practices.

iTMS DRM removable?

thoffman — 2006-06-15T16:25:45+00:00

The Apple DRM seems to be fixable (i.e. removable) although I've never tried, never purchased anything from iTMS. Check out the software at http://www.hymn-project.org/

iTMS DRM removable?

pflugstad — 2006-06-15T16:10:10+00:00

And, for good measure, it is currently easy to remove the iTMS DRM so the restrictions may end up harming lawful consumers while having little or no effect on large-scale illegal copiers.

I wasn't aware that removing the iTMS DRM (FairPlay?) was easy? It's been broken?

Exelent news

knobunc — 2006-06-15T13:46:06+00:00

What about Musicmatch?

-ben

iTunes runs into trouble in Norway

maney — 2006-06-15T13:31:55+00:00

"Cultural content has importance to society above and beyond its ability to generate a profit," the Ombudsman writes ...

Which reminds me of something similar (though phrased more narrowly, addressing specifically the printed word subset of media) that I loved so well I added it to my tagline collection on first sight:

The reason [limited term of copyright is] important is this: Publishers are in the business of expanding capital. The writers who supply them are in the business of expanding civilization itself. -- John Bloom

You go, Ombudsman. How come we don't have one of them here in the land of the formerly free?

Exelent news

ekj — 2006-06-15T12:24:57+00:00

The music industry is a cartel anyway. And they're dealing monopoly-goods.

In practice, the consumer doesn't have much choise as to which download-service he wants to use. For certain things (i.e. those that are iTMS exclusive) he has no choice at all.

Besides, which legal download-service *should* I choose if I want to download music and play it on, for example, the Slimp3 ? As far as I'm aware there are none, and the labels would infact not allow a online-music-shop that sells unencumbered files to peddle "their" artists.

Yeah, I know about the Russian thing, but the RIAA claim that's illegal too.

Exelent news

dion — 2006-06-15T10:51:25+00:00

I'm from Denmark and I'm quite used to consumer protection laws that cannot be circumvented by contract, it's good to see that the ombudsmen are waking up to the dangers of DRM.

I've read some comments about this (mainly from americans) that go something like this: "If you don't like the deal, don't take it", what they fail to realize is that we have consumer protection laws that:
1) Forbid unreasonable and misleading terms.
2) Forbid circumventing the law, even by contract.

#2 means that no matter what you do you can never lose your consumer rights, even if you sign a contract waiving those rights.