Saturday, February 02, 2008

DRM is Well and Truly Dead

The death sentence on DRM was pronounced more than 6 months ago when EMI and Apple joined hands to break the music industry's cartel and drop DRM from the products they sold. Now the beast is well and truly dead. The last (and the dirtiest) of the big four music labels (Sony) has finally joined EMI, Warner and Universal in dropping support for DRM.

Yesss!!!

And as I wondered in April last year, where does this leave Microsoft? Vista runs like a dog compared to XP partly on account of DRM and the other anti-user "security" features it's bloated with. Well, now that DRM is a waste of time, why bother upgrading to Vista (even if you did like handcuffs)? These handcuffs don't even work!

I was very worried at a certain point in time that the intellectual property pendulum had swung so far to the right that some music industry executives even had the nerve to say in public that people skipping ads on TV were "stealing". The cartel is still dangerous, but the death of DRM has surely hurt them.

It gives me great pleasure to see the world slowly but surely changing for the better.

John Howard - gone. DRM - gone. George W Bush - going. Microsoft ...

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