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The ruling was prompted by a complaint from Forbrukerradet, the country's consumer rights body. It had claimed that restricting iTunes playback to just one kind of portable player, Apple's own iPod, violated Norwegian law.

Torgeir Waterhouse, senior advisor at the Norwegian Consumer Council, said that the ruling is a big breakthrough that will return the right to control their music purchases to consumers.

'It doesn't get any clearer than this. Fairplay is an illegal lock-in technology whose main purpose is to lock the consumers to the total package provided by Apple by blocking interoperability,' Waterhouse told Out-Law.com. 'For all practical purposes this means that iTunes Music Store is trying to kill off one

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the most important building blocks in a well functioning digital society, interoperability, in order to boost its own profits.'

Waterhouse believes that Apple now has three alternatives: to license Fairplay to other player manufacturers such as Creative and SanDisk; to develop an open standard with those manufacturers; or to drop DRM altogether.

As things stand, the third option is ruled out, unless the music industry changes its mind with regard to DRM. Just six months ago this seemed highly unlikely, though more recently EMI has begun experimenting with a handful of DRM-free, MP3 releases, while there has been much talk at this week's Midem music industry conference at Cannes, France, of abandoning copy protection.

Apple has a fourth option, to simply close the Norwegian store, a move which would have the opposite effect to that desired by consumer campaigners, in restricting rather than expanding consumer choice.

Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr said earlier this week that the company is aware of the concerns and wants a swift resolution.

'Apple hopes that European governments will encourage a competitive environment that lets innovation thrive, protects intellectual property and allows consumers to decide which products are successful,' he said.

The company has until 1 October to prepare its response.