It has recently been in the news that Apple boss Steve Jobs has requested that all the worlds largest record companies agree to sell their music online without DRM (Digital Rights Management).
I’m sure you’ve come across the problems which I have which is incompatibility. All of a sudden you find you can’t put your music onto your other computer or music playing device.
Apples iTunes which is arguably the best legal music downloading system on the internet has this problem but from reading the news over the past few weeks it has been bought to my attention that it isn’t Apple which is giving us this problem. It is the money hungry record labels which won’t let Apple sell their music without DRM.
We should be able to use our music which we pay for the license to listen to on any medium we see fit without some piece of code saying “no you can’t do that”.
I can’t use any of the music I download off iTunes on anything other than my Laptop or PC because I don’t have an iPod and my other music players don’t support the DRM Apple is forced to put onto the music before they can sell it online.
Although there is a way around this but it is not a method I would like to use on a large amount of tracks. It’s as simple as opening up a program such as Adobe Audition and setting your computers audio input device to Wave and click record. I know its a lot of effort but there is no other way to listen to the music on my phone which is my MP3 playing device.
There is no way they are ever going to stop copyright as people will always find a way around the protection which is put on.
But and it’s a bit BUT what they will end up doing is driving all their valued, law abiding customers onto illegal means of downloading just so they can use the music they download in the manner they want to.
Sources:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6337275.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6344929.stm