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Today at 3GSM World Congress in Cannes, Microsoft and Nokia announced an agreement to give Nokia handsets the benefit of Windows Media Audio and Windows Media Digital Rights Management 10.

Microsoft and Nokia are working to ensure consumers can enjoy music from the newly-launched Nokia and Loudeye mobile music service platform on both Nokia handsets and Windows XP-based PCs.

Using the latest technologies like Windows Media® Audio, Windows Media Digital Rights Management (DRM) 10, Media Transfer Protocol (MTP), and support for Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) digital rights management, Microsoft have covered every base with Nokia. The software firm have even offered support for the MPEG Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) family of codecs in Windows Media Player via a plug-in.

The mobile music service from Nokia and Loudeye is based on the OMA DRM and MPEG AAC standards and enables a wireless operator's customers to search, listen, download and pay for music using an operator-branded music application on their mobile device. Windows Media Player is used for the PC component of the music solution, and wireless operators will be able to brand their music service when it is integrated into the Windows Media Player.

View: Microsoft Press Release
View: Microsoft Corp
View: Nokia

Neowin spoke to LokiTorrent's owner, Lowkee, a few weeks ago, as the legal battle was just getting underway. "I run a completely legal website that the MPAA or anyone else has no right to force me to close," he said. "In just the past few weeks, the MPAA has forced the shutdown of many other BitTorrent sites which were set up to do nothing more than allow people to share what they wished. It will be a dark day when we roll over to let organizations such as the RIAA and MPAA make our freedom of speech laws for us.

"Piracy is a byproduct of peer sharing," he added. When peer-to-peer software is being written, there aren't 10 developers wringing their hands together over how much software and music people can steal from those who make a living selling it. Peer sharing is used to allow people who don't have the financial funding of the MPAA and RIAA to share their works, for free, to a worldwide audience without the massive costs of bandwidth punishing them for being popular."

Remember, for all its faults (including the odd lawsuit against 12-year-olds, or dead people), the Recording Industry Association of America did do one thing differently. It waited until there was a mainstream, easily-available and legal alternative to the P2P networks before it launched its legal actions. Napster, iTunes and all have taken off - they may not yet have the same volume of downloads as services like Kazaa did in their hey-day, but it's growing all the time, and surely it won't be that much longer until legal music downloads actually do take over.

The movie business, however, is nowhere near this level. Napster has mentioned it plans to get into it at some point in the future, but no dates have been mentioned yet. There are a few services up and running now, but many of them are (once again) American-only - and others have a small selection of films that most of us have never heard of. Hardly that great of an incentive when a quick search will yield the latest blockbuster, watchable within just a few hours. Link up your computer to your TV and a decent surround sound system, and it's pretty much impossible to tell it apart from the real thing.

I have no doubt legal movie downloads - whether they're pay-per-view, download and keep, or a 24-hour "licence" to watch (pretty much like getting a movie out of Blockbuster or somewhere else at the moment) will come. However, it seems that it's still quite a long way off. More and more people have broadband, more and more people are wanting to use it to its full potential. More and more people are discovered the wonders of downloading films quickly and easily; until there are some viable, legal alternatives, the MPAA is facing an uphill struggle in shutting down BitTorrent trackers.

Neowin's Tom Graham contributed to this report

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