I have a small, tiny, infinitesimal ‘thing’ about something called Digital Rights Management (DRM). DRM is the un-lubed finger slipped past the sphincters of unsuspecting consumer primarily by the music and movie industries. Officially, DRM allows copyright holders to fight unauthorized copying of their digital content. Before this was an issue, copyright holders had some protections, but so did consumers. If I went to Sam Goody (anyone remember Sam Goody?) and bought a Suicidal Tendencies CD, I was not allowed to make copies for my friends. Conversely, say my car only had a cassette player. Thanks to fair use laws, I was allowed to copy my CD to a blank cassette so I could listen to Mike Muir screaming his heart out in my car or Walkman (anyone remember the Walkman?). Officially, DRM was only to be a means of extending this copyright protection to digital media like movies and music.

In reality, DRM completely controls how you consume the digital content you have bought. DRM is why, until recently, music purchased on iTunes would only play on iPods. DRM is why Coldplay’s X&Y CD might not play on Mac computers. DRM is why former customers of Microsoft’s MSN Music are pretty much hosed unless something is done in Redmond to help them out.

Awhile back, after releasing the Zune, Microsoft shut down the MSN Music store in favor of the Zune Marketplace. Recently, the decision was made to shut down the servers in charge of keeping track of licenses and system authorizations. MSN Music worked much like iTunes does today: you buy DRM’d music through an account. You can authorize up to 5 computers on your account that can have this licensed music. You can add or remove computers as needed. With these servers shut down, users can no longer add or remove authorized systems. Effectively, these users have three choices:

• Burn the purchased songs to a CD and rip the CD to MP3. The mp3s will not have any DRM, however this is will result in a serious loss in audio quality.
• Keep the music on the same system(s) and never get rid of it and never have to reinstall or upgrade the operating system. Ever. Once a system is authorized, it can play all your MSN Music purchases. OS upgrades can require re-authorization. How realistic is this?
• Buy new copies of the music. Because it’s not like you’ve already purchased the music. Seriously. You haven’t. I’m not making this up. The music industry and RIAA see purchasing music as paying for the right to listen to it. You don’t own the music, just the right have a copy of it and listen to it within their limitations. Once these servers are shut down in September, your rights as they apply to MSN Music files are forever locked. I guess this is what they deem as “fair use” nowadays.

Now, a simple solution to this would have Microsoft ask all former MSN Music subscribers to contact them with account information & a list of songs they purchased. Microsoft should be able to verify these lists and offer credits for each song either in the Zune Marketplace or with some third-party vendor like amazon.com. Whether this happens or not remains to be seen, but the premise is still there. This little episode highlights probably the main reason DRM is bad for consumers - it has the ability to strip them of their rights.

If you’re interested in DRM-free music, iTunes has iTunes Plus. Also, amazon.com recently opened their mp3 store with prices equal to iTunes, support from all 4 major labels and no DRM to be found. I’m sure there are other legal sources, this is just what I know of.