techNOcool

DRM is bad. I heard a couple of countries in the EU are starting to fight DRM, and it seems like the EU continually has to pick up the regulatory slack for us these days... But, that's beside the point, which is again, that DRM is bad. It's the industry trying to glean every last penny out of their assets, and missing the forest for the trees.

On the other hand, I don't know what all the fuss is about with buying Beatles music online. How many copies of Abbey Road do I need?

My parents were totally confused by iTunes. They were exasperated at the thought they would have to rebuy their music a third time. I told them to just stick with their DRM free CD's and even their LP's, and listen to that music if they get an iPod.

Ha... In an attempt to be ironic, I put enough shameless Amazon plugs in to the comment that Moveable Type's junk comment filter blocked my last comment. Didn't know we even had a junk filter on there. Neat.

Yes, MT has a junk filter built in. It works very well to keep junk comments and trackbacks from being published. Unfortunately, though, it does nothing to stop them from being submitted. We get hundreds of each - especially trackbacks - submitted. I just deleted 125 junk comments from this blog (and changed the auto-junk settings to delete after 7 days instead of 14) and over 1500 junk trackbacks from the system (all blogs). This is putting a load on the server, so I wish there were an easy way to stop it. (I looked into adding some text that you had to type, but there were issues there that I'm not prepared to tackle at the moment. I'm also not convinced it's a great solution.)

I forgot to comment on the humor of Steve Jobs, Mr. DRM (AAC) himself being against DRM. This article from wired illustrates my point. It reminded me the story I heard in a couple places about Norway. (Warning: last link is clean, but contains NSFW content on site.)

Looks like EMI is thinking of selling DRM free software, according to today's NYT...so maybe something will come of all this

As for the fuss about buying the Beatles, etc....I don't need another copy of Abbey Road. I have it on CD and have ripped it to iTunes. But I'm tired of buying CDs of albums I used to have just because I'd like to have one song from the album on my iPod. Until iTunes sells Beatles music, I have to buy the whole CD just to get Lennon singing Imagine. I'd also like McCartney doing Maybe I'm a Man, but don't want to buy that whole CD, either.