“Why is DRM so contentious? Surely it’s designed to protect the rights of artists and record companies in a climate where, as one international music industry body claims, illegal downloads swamp legitimate music store downloads by a ratio of 20 to 1? The problem is DRM doesn’t affect the pirates, who upload and download DRM-free files often ripped directly from CD. Instead, it affects legitimate buyers in a range of deeply irritating ways. The first roadblock comes down to Gates’ talk of “simplicity” and “interoperability”, or rather the lack of both“

DRM is the biggest thing I hate about Zune’s Marketplace. It gets in the way of me enjoying music that I purchased, and it limits consumers to specific Mp3 player brand and music services. Luckily, there are programs out there like FairUse4WM or Hymn which can convert DRM’d tracks into normal fair use Mp3’s. One day, I hope we won’t need programs like this to circumvent the restrictions placed by greedy record companies and we will be able to listen to our music an transfer it around as we please.

-Jameson

[Source: Zune Thoughts]

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 1:09 pm and is filed under DRM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.