The Darkest Evil

A couple of days ago, Steve Jobs made a post on Apple.com about his thoughts on music and no, this isn’t just restricted to the iPod nor the iTunes Music Store. This includes DRM in all shapes and forms. Mr. Jobs has a good point and not only that, but it is GREAT that he is stepping up to say what needs to be said.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

DRMs don’t work. Even IF they made the perfect way to encrypt the music, there’s always other low-tech manners to produce a non-protected music file. Plus, in addition, the record labels currently hold the most success in selling music that is not protected by a DRM method. As long as they sell CDs, they may very well be the ones fuelling the torrents and downloads via LimeWire or Acquisition.

Digital Rights Management sucks. It always has and always will. And not only that, but the whole anti-piracy movement sucks. Many innocent people get hurt by the actions of renegade anti-piracy companies and their close-minded CEOs. This also includes people in the software industry that use overly thuggish actions just to protect one or two lines of code or just because they are not open minded.

A majority of the software I write is open source and that which isn’t, is available without the fear of thugs like Howard Spinks coming to take it down for their own depraved opinions. And THAT is my two cents.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 11th, 2007 at 2:23 pm and is filed under General. 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.