About DRM protected music that you have purchased

[nightflier]

I don't like the direction it's going either but I don't think this creates a right to steal music or defeat DRM.

It does give one the impetus to protest. Napster was a form of protest. In hindsight, perhaps not the best one, but it made a point about selection that the music industry and the home electronics industry just can't address. The only option is for one company (iTunes?) to own and distribute it all. I'm not comfortable with that.

Yes, the music was free on Napster, but I think the unlimmitted selection was what made it most attractive.

[noddin0ff]

It does give one the impetus to protest. Napster was a form of protest. In hindsight, perhaps not the best one, but it made a point about selection that the music industry and the home electronics industry just can't address. The only option is for one company (iTunes?) to own and distribute it all. I'm not comfortable with that.

Yes, the music was free on Napster, but I think the unlimmitted selection was what made it most attractive.

I guess that's the source of our longstanding philosophical disagreement. I just don't buy the argument that Liberté, égalité, fraternité, ou la mort! is what’s driving music piracy. It’s not protest that makes people download.

Sure, I can see developing a free filesharing platform as a political statement--decentralization; the people own the info, no central authority. But, the utopian use for this technology is to promote access and distribution of information and ideas for social progress. It is not to create free unrestricted access to licensed, copyrighted, or protected works so everyone can download something of commercial value without paying for it.

Technology certainly leapfrogged the media peddlers. If the streets were filled with $1 bills, I think most people would pick them up even if they knew deep down inside they probably belonged to someone else. After all, how bad could it be to pick up $1 if there are so many out there and everyone else is doing it…no one’s going to get in trouble for picking up a $1 bill. That’s what technology did to music and that’s what most people are thinking when they download.

In the digital age, unless all musicians want to work for free, get all their income from touring, or never produce albums, DRM is going to be necessary in order to collect the revenues to maintain the infrastructure to promote music. If everyone had kept buying CD’s we wouldn’t have had to go there.

My personal utopian vision is for every band to adopt a model of open source DRM so they can all control their music however they want. Let the web promote them, skip ‘The Man’ entirely. Sell downloads direct to the people who want them.

either that or go back to putting everything on vinyl....