Torgeir Waterhouse a senior advisor to the Norwegian Consumer Council, is reported saying: "We're not specifically targeting iTunes Music Store DRM – MSN Music was explicitly mentioned in our original complaint together with CDON.com, Music Online.no and Prefueled.com and we are asking that their conditions also are evaluated against Norwegian law. This has been in there since the original filing".

Norway's Marketing Control Act, which came into force in 2005 allows consumers to break copy protection of CDs to play them on "relevant equipment" and this is said to cover the transfer of music from iTunes to other formats. iTunes has been targeted to test the legislation, because, in Norway as elsewhere, it is the most widely used online music service.

Norway's Consumer Council has given Apple until 21 June to respond on the questions of whether iTunes should work on other platforms, after which the Council has said it will impose fines. Apple is reported to have said it wants to be able to resolve the matter rather than being forced to shut down its service.

However to achieve this universality of use of downloaded music would require that all playing devices use the same or interoperable digital rights management techniques. And more widespread adoption of legislation with similar requirements could have  major impact on all providers who use proprietary digital rights management technology.

 For example, in Australia, Telstra's recently launched BigPond movies download service uses Microsoft digital rights management. So anyone wanting to use the service must buy a copy of Windows and a computer that runs it: the Microsoft DRM software does not run under the Mac OS X operating system. In Norway, would this service fall foul of the same legislation being used against iTunes, even though it is not Microsoft's decision but Telstra's decision to use its DRM technology that restricts the service to Windows users?

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