Saturday, March 11, 2006

DRM: Annoying Mistake

The big DRM mistake


Digital Rights Managements hurts paying customers, destroys Fair Use rights, renders customers' investments worthless, and can always be defeated. Why are consumers and publishers being forced to use DRM?


I have to say that DRM is really on my s*it list these days. I was excited to find out that the Seattle Public Library had three separate e-book and digital audio book relationships so you can access content without even leaving the house. However, I quickly found that one uses WMA files with DRM (which won't play on my Neuros) and the other uses a proprietary software player that somehow integrates with Windows media player. I can't even play these files on Linux, let alone on a portable media player. And I can't burn most of them to CDs to play in the car. What do they expect you to do--play hours of audio books while sitting at your PC??? Retarded.

I'm going to go back to getting the CD audio books and then ripping them so that I can listen to them on the bus on my Neuros.

Note to content producers: you are reducing the play that your clients are getting by using DRM. I will be less able to learn of new authors because it is much more of a hassle to actually listen to the content.

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