Will EMI unlock music revolution?

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More DRM nonsense.

DRM = digital rights management. For music.

Here's the deal. Download music from iApple, pay a bit. it only plays on their iPods , no other device. users are locked in.

Apple has "over solved" the problem. They not only prevented cheating and illegal copying, but they established a monopoly whereby their store is the only music store allowed on line, and their ipod is the only music device allowed offline. Everyone else is locked out.

Customers are still screaming about this "solution" to the problem of illegal copying of tunes.

Just the same as this iRiver device I have hanging around my neck to play my tunes ? it "over solved" the problem of downloading music to it by only working when connecting to a winxp machine. No other operating system is acceptable. I'm still screaming about that , yes, and I will never buy another and obviously recoomend everyone stay away from these iRiver devices.

You know , all of these copying problems would go away very easily if you simply modified the mp3 players everyone has ? Allow them to receive songs, but not upload them again. (Also allow them to erase songs , obviously). Thus they can no longer be used to copy songs from one computer to another. They can play , they can erase, thats it.

Nope, not gonna happen.

Microsoft's take on the Digital Rights Management is to invent a special microsoft only format for this stuff, and it only works on windows machines, locking apple and linux and everyone else out. And no , they're not going to sell the rights to apple to immitate it , they want to drown apple and say "you can't do that. Ever. Get a windows machine instead." backed up with a platoon of lawyers. Yeah , we're screaming about that too.

These people arn't interested in solving the DRM issue. There must be a dozen different ways to come to a reasonable accomidation , but thats not what they're interested in. They're interested only in taking you the consumer for a ride.