So ever since Steve shared his keynote stage with Sony prez Kunitake Ando to celebrate the "Year of HD," there's been a fair amount of speculation about some sort of major Apple-Sony alliance in the works, with suggested possibilities ranging from cobranded iPods to Sony movies for sale through an Apple digital download service to an out-and-out buyout of Apple by Sony. Personally, we don't even know if Steve and Kuni would share so much as a hummus platter when they aren't onstage in front of millions of potential customers, but we will say one thing: at least those guys are getting sued together.

And lookee here, it's by the French! A CNET article notes that both Sony and Apple have been slapped with a lawsuit by a French consumer watchdog group because each company sells its digital music downloads in a format that works only on its own portable players, which the association claims is "limiting consumer choice." Sound familiar? That's because Apple, at least, has been down this road before, and more than once; the same goofy claim was recently made by a California nutjob who complained that the iTunes Music Store "forced him to buy an iPod," and Virgin Mega (again, in France) also sued Apple for "wrongfully refusing to license FairPlay." This time around, UFC-Que Choisir wants both Apple and Sony to cough up €30,000 in fines and let other portables play their songs.

But, of course, the whole "limiting consumer choice" argument is more or less bull hockey, since Apple's usage terms clearly state that a song download is playable on an unlimited number of iPods, not other players. If a given consumer is deranged enough to want to buy a non-iPod player, there's nothing stopping him from getting one and then going to one of the myriad Windows Media-based stores out there and loading it up with the exact same songs offered by the iTMS or Sony Connect; an article in The Register pointed out by faithful viewer John Blackburne reminds us all that a French court already dismissed Virgin Mega's case for that very reason. In fact, Sony getting sued over this is especially ludicrous, since its store is perhaps the best proof available that consumer choice is alive and kicking: its Sony Connect service, which sells ATRAC3 songs that only play on Sony portable devices, is getting stomped into a fine powder in the marketplace precisely because consumers have chosen not to buy either its lackluster, high-priced players or the ATRAC3 songs that'll play on them.

In terms of raw technical compatibility, Sony may have a tougher fight ahead of it, but Apple can always point out that, hey, it licensed FairPlay to Motorola and now iTMS songs can be played on some mobile phones. Plus, iTMS customers can burn their music to CDs and play them in any portable CD player; Apple doesn't even make those. If customers really want to play iTMS songs on one of those Nomads or whatever, they can always take their burned CDs and re-encode the music as plain vanilla MP3. And at least the iTMS works with Windows; nearly all of the other stores sell music in the Windows Media format, which is "limiting consumer choice" at least as much as Apple's store, because none of those other stores work on a Mac-- so how come UFC-Que Choisir hasn't sued Microsoft for tying protected WMA playback to its own operating system?

So it's all a crock, and we expect the French courts to treat this case largely the same as it treated the last one, i.e. by tossing it out like last week's trash. But who knows? Maybe Sony and Apple will bond over this little legal annoyance and it'll be the catalyst that spawns a thousand years of iron-fisted Sony-Apple world domination. Or something.