Norway Drops DRM Complaint Against Apple

itunestied Norway, which had threatened to take Apple to court over its copy-protection of songs purchased through iTunes, announced Wednesday it was dropping its complaint.

“We have no reason to pursue them anymore,” Norway mediator Bjorn Erik Thon told AFP.

Norway had threatened to haul Cupertino into court over restrictions that blocked songs purchased through iTunes being copied to portable music devices other than Apple’s iPod.

Along with Norway, France and Germany joined the fight to force Apple to ditch DRM. The battle between Apple and the European countries originated in 2006 when Norway’s Consumer Council charged the iPod lock-in violated the nation’s Marketing Control Act.

In January, Apple marketing head Phil Schiller announced the Silicon Valley firm would drop its DRM-based FairPlay technology in favor of iTunes Plus. Apple said DRM should be stripped from all of its 10 million iTunes entries by April.

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Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.

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