I don't think Steve Jobs said "Non!," but it captures the essence of Apple's position on a digital rights management bill making its way through the French law-making process.

The lower house of the French parliament, the National Assembly, passed a bill last week that will require all proprietary DRM formats used on content sold in France to be cross-licensable between format owners. This will supposedly allow any vendor to translate any other vendor's protected content into its own DRM format.

The intention of the bill is to ensure that content purchased from any online music service can be legally transferred and played on any digital music player.

The legislation is sponsored by Christian Vanneste, a controversial right-wing French politician (controversial as in publicly making homophobic remarks and bemoaning the end of French colonialism). According to Reuters, Vanneste claims "the draft law aimed to fight piracy, encourage the development of the online digital music market in France and benefit legal online music retailers."

Given that Apple's iTunes owns about 70% of the downloaded music market and has never licensed its FairPlay DRM to anyone, it isn't surprising the company is not too happy about this nascent legislation. Reuters quoted Natalie Kerris, an Apple spokeswoman, as characterizing the proposed law as state-sponsored piracy.

Apple's position is that should this law pass, "legal music sales will plummet just when legitimate alternatives to piracy are winning over customers." Here's what Apple really means: Our music sales will plummet because, even though our music is way too expensive, customers find iTunes easy to use and don't know how to get around our DRM so they overlook the cost. But we know that should anyone else be able to use our format, we'll be screwed.

The question is, if the bill is ratified by the French upper house, the Senate, what will Apple do? Shut down its French operations? Non! Open its DRM format? Merde!

What Apple should do is the latter, as the argument for DRM as a market control strategy is flawed. For a start, the goal of a DRM policy is not the management of publishers' rights, it's the restriction of consumers' rights.

But the biggest flaw is that DRM can't be implemented successfully. You want to break Apple's AAC format, which uses DRM? Easy - burn the tracks you want to a CD and then rip the CD to another format. Sure, this hack is as elegant as me dancing the tango, but it gets the job done.