France’s Trade Minister Christine Lagarde visited technology executives in Silicon Valley, and brought plenty of European attitude along on the trip.

Microsoft says recovery from malware is becoming impossible. Well, duh.

Lawmakers in France characterize the passage of an online copyright draft bill by the National Assembly as one that will permit customers to download songs from other music stores to iPods and make it even more appealing to Apple’s hardware customers.

Engadget posts that CNet’s MP3 Insider studied several MP3 players and discovered that you lose several hours of battery life when playing DRM music.

Yahoo Music VP and general manager Dave Goldberg suggested to attendees at the Music 2.0 conference that music labels should try selling their songs online without the encumbrance of copy protection schemes.

Okay, some stuff sitting around in open tabs:

An array of technology companies just found out who SoftVault Systems is: a patent holding company that developed digital rights management technology, and the willingness to sue over them.

Yahoo has launched a podcasting site, a place that’s not only a directory of podcasts but also a great resource of rich information on podcasting generally, and a one-stop-shop for your podcasts and music purchasing.

Sun Microsystems has opened up its “Project DReaM,” which it wants to develop as a royalty free, open source DRM option.

Another Hollywood player, Lions Gate Home Entertainment, will release its next generation DVDs under the Blu-ray format.

In a great argument against DRM inside the enterprise (e.g. asserting control over email), a truly salient point…

The Dutch electronics manufacturer signs a non-exclusive deal with Microsoft to use its digital rights management technology.

A group of hackers from the United States and Norway have released a crack, which bypasses Apple’s digital rights management software used by songs downloaded from iTunes.