Shane’s Drivel

Its been a glorious week for consumer electronics. DRM is dead and the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray format war is over. Consumers win on both fronts.

In the case of HD-DVD/Blu-Ray, consumers sat firmly on the sidelines until the industry was collectively ready to start selling players and movies. More movie studios and hardware makers simply picked a side, blu-ray.  Thank you!

DRM has been a bit more frustrating. I can’t count how many times in the gym my mp3 player said “no license for playback”, requiring me to remember to sync the thing up with my laptop connected to the Yahoo Unlimited mothership. Ugh. Same goes for “buying” a DRM’d mp3 or wav somewhere and then attempting to play it on your computers (plural) of choice. Ugh.

At long last, the industry realized that while pirates will always pirate, you stand a good chance of turning otherwise good people into pirates if you make your product so #(%&’#$ frustrating to use legally. FINALLY, the recording industry finally sided with its paying customer base and quit using DRM. Thank you!

But Mr Digital Music Consumer, don’t get too cocky with DRM-free content. The stuff is still copyrighted and if you ship it around the internet, the RIAA will know. DRM-free digital music will still be watermarked with a code indicating who it was originally sold to. So if you distribute illegal copies, your essentially sending out red flags that indict yourself.