Yes, I couldn’t resist making a play on “All your base are belong to us”. \ud83d\ude09 <\/p>\n
All readers of this blog know that I don’t like DRM (Digital Rights Management) because it restricts access to books\/music\/media to specific systems and\/or Operating Systems. The following news confirms all the stuff I dislike about DRM’d systems.<\/p>\n
If a person bought music from the MSN Music store are only allowed to hear it on specific computers and devices. Whats so wrong about that? you ask me. Nothing much except that Microsoft is the one who controls the licensing server and they can decide to shut them down. In fact thats what is going to happen by the end of the summer, MS is going to shut down the MSN music licensing servers and after that no new computers can be authorized to play *your* music that you have paid for.<\/p>\n
So lets say you have this laptop and have authorized it to play your music, a few months down the line its hard drive dies so you get a new one and want to transfer your music to the new laptop. Unfortunately you can’t do that, because the licensing servers have been shut down you can’t authorize the new system. So all the money you spent on ‘buying’ that music has been wasted. <\/p>\n
In reality with DRM’d files you are not purchasing the music. You are renting it. Other people can decide weather they want to continue allowing access to these files or not. This is my problem with DRM. <\/p>\n
Another example, I bought a book online from Fictionwise. It is DRM protected and the reader software only works on Windows. I have switched from a windows system to Linux so I can no longer read the book unless I convert it to another format.Which I can’t do because its illegal to break DRM. <\/p>\n
So what can I do? Should I have to keep one machine running windows to read this book? Should I crack it? Buy another copy? <\/p>\n
Would you agree to buy a car that would only run on specific roads? No? Then why do we allow DRM’d information that is only accessable on specific computers\/OS?<\/p>\n
Think about it.<\/p>\n