Sorry, folks, but the prospect of protracted French farce in the form of a bitter Apple courtroom battle has just gone up in smoke. Remember when Virgin Mega asked to license Apple's FairPlay Digital Rights Management system (so it could sell iPod-compatible song downloads) and was told, just like RealNetworks, to go play in traffic? Well, instead of reverse-engineering its own iPod compatibility without Apple's consent like Real did, Virgin Mega went a far more predictable route: it tried to sue the license-denying bejeezus out of Apple, claiming abuse of market dominance under French antitrust law in hopes of forcing the company to open up FairPlay. My, isn't it refreshing to see Apple attacked as an abusive monopoly for a change?

Well, don't get too used to it, because like we said, the whole lawsuit just went kaflooey. Faithful viewer David Poves dished us a CNET article which reports that the French Competition Council has flat-out dismissed the case, thereby denying the world the joy of watching equal parts heartwrenching drama and side-splitting slapstick unfold during a prolonged court battle. And just why did the Council feel the need to nuke our fun before the party even got off the ground? It cites a "lack of 'sufficiently convincing elements'" in Virgin Mega's claim that Apple has to license FairPlay to anyone who wants it or else dire consequences will befall the entire music download industry and inside of two years we'll all be walking around trying to listen to AM radio through a small speaker plugged into a potato or something.

Basically, Virgin Mega's big mistake was not realizing that the members of the council have eyes, ears, and brains in their heads, because thusly equipped, they were able to see perfectly plainly that "access to the FairPlay DRM isn't indispensable to the development of legal platforms for the downloading of online music." Indeed, as long as the company's arguing to someone with at least three of their five senses intact and more than six functioning brain cells, it's kind of tough for Virgin Mega to persuasively claim otherwise, given the obvious existence of a slew of non-FairPlay download services such as Napster, Rhapsody, MusicMatch, MSN Music, Wal-Mart, etc. (Sure, you can point out that none of those businesses is exactly making money hand over fist, but we never said they were profitable music services.)

So, since anyone can start up one of these services without a FairPlay license in hand and customers can choose from a number of those services and from literally dozens of compatible devices, where's the abuse? After all, just because an overwhelming majority of those customers choose iTunes and iPods doesn't mean that Apple has a monopoly. What it does mean is that Apple makes products and services that don't suck eggs. As far as we know, that's still not against the law, even in France.

The French Competition Council apparently agrees, so for now, at least, it doesn't look like any government is stepping in to force Apple to let every two-bit little music download store out there climb onto the iPod for a free ride to Coolsville. Sorry about the lack of ensuing courtroom drama, but let's face it: you aren't too crazy about subtitles anyway.

How strange; apparently Apple's had some sort of drastic corporate personality shift or something, because its standard of quality seems to have ratcheted up a few thousand points overnight. Whereas just a couple of days ago every single Apple product listed at the company's online store rated "5 Apples" because the folks at the company "think they're great," now they all rate zero Apples, which we can only assume means that the very same people now "think they blow chunks." We haven't seen a mood swing this drastic or abrupt since Sybil.

Oh, wait-- never mind. Apparently the products don't rate zero Apples after all; faithful viewer andrü informs us that, according to MacMinute, Apple has simply eliminated the "rating" system for its own products entirely. So instead of every Apple product automatically getting a "5 Apples" score, now they're just devoid of any form of evaluation whatsoever, no matter how empty and self-serving; third party products at the Apple Store can still be rated from one to five stars and reviewed by customers in 300 words or less, while Apple's own products just... are. It's a slightly odd juxtaposition now that we look at it.

Still, this is probably the closest you're going to see to an admission by the company that the whole "5 Apples" thing was probably a bad idea to begin with. Sure, it was cute, but we could see it coming off as needy to some people, cocky to others, and just plain dorky to some of the rest. Clearly Apple eventually came around to the same point of view, since it had already toned down its FAQ to downplay the intentional goofiness of the whole "5 Apples" rating-- a FAQ from which any and all mention of that particular topic has now been expunged. Apart from the unsettling feeling of emptiness you might experience when reading Apple product descriptions at the Apple Store, it's like those ratings never existed at all.

But does Apple really intend to leave its own products conspicuously ratingless while everything else at the Apple Store has a user-determined star rating and attached customer reviews? Is the company really so allergic to potential criticism that it can't bear the idea of someone giving the iPod U2 Special Edition four stars instead of five because it doesn't come with a lock of Bono's hair? Because frankly, Apple preventing customers from rating its own products smacks of a deep-seated inferiority complex that most savvy buyers would smell a mile away; we can't say that it would necessarily send suspicious potential Mac/iPod customers clicking away to buy a Wintel and a Digital Jukebox from Dell, of course, but in any case, a perceived lack of confidence on a manufacturer's part can't be good for business.

Well, sources say that Apple isn't planning to allow customer ratings of its own products anytime soon, but fear not, because sources say that something else is coming to fill the gaping void left by the departure of the uniform "5 Apples" ratings. How does a uniform "10 Apples" rating sound? Twice as good, right? Right!

Since things are still pretty slow in the Apple world right now, does anyone mind if we take a quick peek over the fence into the Land of Alleged iPod-Killers? As you well know, there have been dozens of devices tagged with that description over the past three years, and despite their arguably better feature sets and inarguably lower prices, not one of them has even come close to the iPod's market share (over 90 percent of all hard drive-based portable music players sold), so you'll forgive us if we're a little skeptical every time someone starts chiming in about how some new up-and-coming device is going to give the iPod a run for its money.

In fact, after so many wrong predictions about which players were going to clean the iPod's handy built-in clock, we're starting to think the pundits are on the verge of getting desperate and cautious at the same time. Case in point: faithful viewer Josh Lockie forwarded us a CNET article with the deliciously tentative title, "Will pocket-size Sony PC take on iPod?" It seems that the new Vaio U is a "full-fledged portable PC" that only weighs 1.2 pounds, has a snazzy 800x600 five-inch touchscreen, and just happens to have "all the capabilities of a hard disk-based audio player." Thus, "a buyer could treat it like a music player," although Sony is clear that it's not really marketing it as such.

Which is good, because it'd fail miserably in the role; for one thing, this freakin' whosis costs $2,000, which is probably just a little more than most people want to pay for an MP3 player-- or, these days, even a laptop. Mostly, though, there's the issue of size: at 6.6 inches by 4.3 inches, CNET describes the Vaio U as "nearly pocketable," which we'll translate as "not pocketable enough." The Vaio U may sell like hotcakes to people looking for the smallest, lightest notebook system they can get their freakishly diminutive mitts on (personally, we doubt it), but we can't in our wildest dreams-- yes, even the ones guest-starring a strangely receptive and slightly tipsy Alyson Hannigan-- imagine more than a few gadget geeks shelling out two grand and then splitting the seams of a pocket with one of these beasts to use it as a portable music player.

Heck, if you want to use history as a guide, you might recall another pricey "nearly pocketable" general-purpose handheld computer with a stylus-driven touchscreen, built-in communication tools, and the capability of running hundreds or thousands of third-party applications: it was called the Newton MessagePad, and it had its clock cleaned by the Palm Pilot, which was far less capable, but did just enough of what people wanted it to do and was cheaper, smaller, and lighter. In this market, portable music players, like PDAs, have got to be small to succeed. Period. And while some people might in fact try to use a Vaio U in place of a dedicated music player for a while, the notion that the product could "take on the iPod" is ludicrous.

That's not to say that it isn't one cool device with a geek-drool quotient of at least 120, provided you don't mind Windows XP. If Apple made a Mac OS X-based equivalent, we'd be all over it like that weird kid in your old kindergarten class running to eat the paste. But somehow we still think we'd be tossing it in a shoulder bag and listening to an iPod riding happily in a pocket with intact seams.