Europe Not Humming Apple's iTune

Apple's (AAPL) system of locking songs sold on its iTunes music store to its iPod portable music player has some European regulators crying foul at a time when the region has helped the company push sales into the stratosphere.

European officials want Apple to open up its digital rights management system, called FairPlay, so songs sold in the iTunes Music Store can be played on other MP3 players -- and songs purchased from other digital music stores can play on iPods.

In countries such as France, Norway and Germany, among others, consumer advocates and government officials have taken various degrees of action to push Apple to interoperate with competitors.

The situation is complicated because individual countries have different laws, but on the whole, "Europe has stronger regulations about tying products together than the U.S. does," says Jason Schultz, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit organization in San Francisco.

Recognizing the possibility of legal action in multiple countries over the digital rights management system, CEO Steve Jobs on Tuesday posted an unusual plea to the major music labels to sell their music without copy protection in place.

"DRMs haven't worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy," Jobs wrote Tuesday on the Apple home page. If the "big four" music labels (Vivendi's Universal, Sony (SNE) BMG, Warner Music Group (WMG) and EMI) stopped mandating DRM for its songs, Apple would happily sell music in an open format, he wrote.