Cooler heads prevail!

2007.04

It's too soon to get overly excited, but it looks as though 2007 may mark the start of the end of many forms of DRM.

"Criminalising the Consumer" is an article that mentions some of the pitfalls of DRM and what appears to be the turning of the tide.

Mark Shuttlworth has also chimed in with a thoughtful piece about the failings of DRM.

Even Steve Jobs, ruler of the iTunes/iPod machine seems to be seeing the light. I have to say, of all of the DRM schemes out there, the iTunes Store does the best job of balancing protection and user rights. I do make use of the iTunes store but am careful to burn everything out to CD and then rip it back as an MP3. Unlike other tools, like say... Windows Media Player, iTunes makes this not only possible, but reasonably slick. However, it's still a pain and I look forward to the day that purchasing songs on iTunes is as easy as doing so on eMusic.

After years of things going in the wrong direction, it's good to see change. Of course, this is on the heals of Microsoft's deep integration of nasty DRM policies in Vista.