Consumer regulators in Europe claim that Apple places too many restrictions on consumers buying songs from the  iTunes store -- and the winds of discontent are blowing across the pond.

The Free Software Foundation carried out protests two weeks ago at Apple retail stores in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle. The issue is digital rights management technology (DRM) which limits what consumers can do with purchased content. These "Defective by Design" protests are aimed not only at Apple, but also at a  growing trend toward legal restrictions that bind digital content to particular playing devices.

"This isn't intended to attack Apple and its innovations, but really to draw attention to the existence of DRM technologies, and how they restrict what consumers can do with their music," says Ted Teah of the Cambridge Massachusetts-based FSF.

Leaflets were passed out at the protests in which Apple CEO Steve Jobs is quoted as saying, "If you legally acquire music, you need to have the right to manage it on all other devices that you own," suggesting that the company is being hypocritical in its use of DRM.

Last year, Sony BMG drew criticism when the company programmed CDs with a hidden code that secretly installed itself on users' hard drives, relayed information back to Sony, and left computers vulnerable to viruses. The result was the recall of  5 million CDs, customer boycotts and class action lawsuits.

Apple's use of DRM  isn't as invasive. Teah says those restrictions may become more onerous, however, and may be used as a basis of legal attacks against consumers by various music industry organizations which have sued consumers found to have downloaded pirated songs from the Internet.

"A teenage girl making a mix tape for a boy she has a crush on could become a target for an expensive lawsuit in the future," says Teah.

Michael Gartenberg, an analyst for JupiterResearch,  says that concerns about the iTunes DRM system are unfounded. "It's fairly innocuous," he says. "You can easily get around the restrictions by burning your songs to a CD, and then reimporting them as an MP3 or any other format you wish."