In a week where the new Nokia Ovi store has been opened and the impending announcement of the new Kumo/Bing search engine from Microsoft the most important news for me was that the EU was pushing the music industry to open up online rights. Question – I hope that applies also to us here in South Africa and not just people in Europe when finally the music industry decides to get with it.

In a comment the EU antitrust regulators are telling the music industry to quickly change their licensing agreements which restricts stores like iTunes from selling the same songs across Europe (and hopefully Africa too!), information from here.

The one real funny bit I found was that some artists had complained about possibly new licences becuase they feel they would be short-changed and miss out on income from increased sales… so would these artists prefer to have lower sales then and take what they can get? As long as they earn money from every song that gets purchased there should be nothing wrong only the percentages have to be worked out.

If the music industry really wanted to combat piracy then stores like iTunes would be able to work throughout the world and not be restricted. If I could purchase the latest episode of Heores off iTunes the day after it aired in the USA that would be great. Don’t know what DSTV would think about that then cause I would need it for would be the sport.

I’m tired of red tape slowing and hampering the online world.