is St. Valentine's Day and with increasing calls to liberate online music it is appropriate to haul out the phrase from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night: "If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die."

I don't know about the dying part, but the surfeit of music is still on the distant horizon until the industry gets rid of its Digital Rights Managements (DRM) system.

DRM describes various software systems and standards that protect or rather, restricts, the use of music tracks in various ways, depending on the supplier. For example DRM on a CD will not allow you to copy music to your computer, or to another disc.

While the online community has long called for a revision of DRM rights, these days it's the big fish that are joining in as advocates of an excess of music. It is ironic that Apple chief executive and founder Steve Jobs has put out on open letter on the company's web-site arguing that DRM does not work to stop piracy.

Jobs after all implemented the Apple iTunes music store with DRM that does not allow the music to be played on other portable players other than the company's own iPod. The protection also meant that music purchased from other online stores cannot be played on the iPod.

However, iTunes was ground-breaking in that the DRM allowed users to copy the music to other computers and to an unlimited number of CDs.

Jobs now wants to extend this further by calling on music companies to abandon DRM altogether. He reminds iPod fans that the device will play music that is free of any DRM and encoded in "open" licensable formats such as MP3 and AAC.

Jobs then blames the Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI, which control the distribution of about 70 per cent of the world's music, on making Apple put copy protection on music sold through iTunes.

Jobs points out that no matter what DRM system is employed, there will always be a hacker willing to break the encryption. The alternative is to stop the proliferation of different DRM standards by removing any need for protection.

"Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats," Job writes. "In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat."

Meanwhile, the Coral Consortium (www.coral-interop.org), which is associated with the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), responded by inviting Jobs to join the industry in forging interoperability between the various DRM standards.

Coral is an inter-industry group working on DRM interoperability. Coral said it had written a letter to Jobs suggesting that "the best way to achieve a truly consumer-friendly interoperable digital distribution marketplace that balances consumer needs with those of the content industry and in which DRM itself it virtually invisible to the consumer, is for Apple, Inc. and other key players to join with the existing members of the Coral Consortium in their efforts to deploy the DRM interoperability solution developed by the Coral participants."

Ken Fisher, writing for online tech publication Ars Tech, argues: "DRM's sole purpose is to maximise revenues by minimising your rights so that they can sell them back to you." He argues that we have always held rights to copy freely what they already own, as long as they do not sell on the recording, which would be illegal. He likens the current situation with music to the battle over video cassette recorders (VCR) during the 1980s.

Back then the movie industry expressed worry that multiple people could watch the same movie on a VCR, but not all of them would have to pay! By the late 1990s, sales of VHS movies were generating more revenue than movie ticket sales. DVD, the successor to VHS and Betamax, greatly widened the gap thanks to outstanding profit margins, Fisher points out.

The same could be true of music, and by extension ? online films. Play on.

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I am happy to find out that Wikipedia is now being run from a French village not too far away from where I'm living.

While it is a three-hour drive over the Cevennes to get to her, I am certainly going to try and pay a visit to Florence Devouard, 38, an agronomist by training who was elected last October to replace Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, as chair of the online encyclopedia's board.

Devouard lives in Malintrat, population 900, which lies near Clermont Ferrand. Hard to believe? This is how internet lives are born and made. Devouard started writing about genetically modified organisms in 2001, was elected to the board three years later, before becoming chairMAN last year.

Wales is going to continue doing public relations for the user-made encyclopedia.