Friday, September 09, 2005

EFF: The Customer Is Always Wrong: A User's Guide to DRM in Online Music

EFF: The Customer Is Always Wrong: A User's Guide to DRM in Online Music

A good article for anyone who buys music through many of the popular online services.

One problem I have, as I have said before, digital rights need to make more sense. We need to be able to EASILY move things to a new machine when we buy them, upgrade software, etc. Plus, and this is important especially for iPod Shuffle users, you need to be able to copy it to a device multiple times. In fact it should be able to handle several devices.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting article. DRM needs re-thinking from the ground-up. For it to truely work properly the song you buy should registered to YOU, not the devices you chose to store it on.

Sadly I don't think we'll ever reach a point where DRM's exist in harmony with the user's needs. Not without losing some kind of freedoms elsewhere.

Howard Hill said...

The RIAA (and MPAA, and all the other alphabet organizations that represent content copyright holders) would really want us to pay for every time we play a song, would do away with the sale of used media, and generally be in every orafice we have if they thought they could get away with it.

There is no good way to do DRM that will make everyone happy. Most people take to burning a CD (DVD, etc) and then ripping from the newly minted CD to get things out of any kind of DRM. That is a lot of hoops to jump through just so you can make sure to do what you want with the media you have purchased.