Digital Home Thoughts: Electronic Frontier Foundation Grades Music Services

"Many digital music services employ digital rights management (DRM) — also known as "copy protection" — that prevents you from doing things like using the portable player of your choice or creating remixes. Forget about breaking the DRM to make traditional uses like CD burning and so forth. Breaking the DRM or distributing the tools to break DRM may expose you to liability under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) even if you're not making any illegal uses. In other words, in this brave new world of "authorized music services," law-abiding music fans often get less for their money than they did in the old world of CDs (or at least, the world before record companies started crippling CDs with DRM, too)."



Online music services still have a long way to go in striking a balance between copy protection and fair use. Personally I'm less than pleased with any existing solution, though I am somewhat warm to Apple's FairPlay scheme. Microsoft has the right idea by attempting to establish a media platform compatible with ALL devices. Unfortunately "Plays for Sure" isn't a completely seamless experience yet, though I'm sure that will improve with time.