Wired is on the DRM-sucks kick again with their article Consumers Don’t Want Flexible DRM.
Buy music from iTunes and your only portable playback option is the iPod. Buy it from Napster, and it’ll only play on certain Microsoft-approved devices. Although you can circumvent these restrictions by burning and re-ripping audio CD-Rs, it’s a poor substitute for real music interoperability.
DRM sucks. Let’s just get that out of the way right now. A company called Navio has made lots of waves with its plan to make DRM suck a little bit less, giving content owners the ability to sell the right to play media directly to consumers using any popular DRM scheme. If you’re a record label, the main attraction here is probably the prospect of selling secure songs directly to iPod owners without forking over a percentage of each sale to the iTunes Music Store.
The problem for tech analysts is that most people have no idea what DRM is and appear to be happy to buy billions of DRM’d tracks off of iTunes.
Wired - if you don’t like DRM’d tracks, learn how to burn a CD or how to download some of the jillions of Creative Commons tracks that are available on the Web - but don’t gripe because you downloaded Eagle’s Greatest Hits from iTunes and you can’t burn 10 copies.
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