"A" For Effort, "D" For Execution

DRM are the dreaded initials that stand for "Digital Rights Management." These are the sets of rules that make it difficult, or nearly impossible to easily enjoy that new song from the iTunes store on anything other than your iPod. If you want to listen to it on your Creative Zen, or SanDisk Sansa, you are clearly out of luck. The only real work around is to burn the iTune track to a CD, and rerip it to the mp3 format. Unfortunately, this quickly becomes impractical as you have more than a CD of music to do, and there also will be a slight quality loss in the coding transformation.

I wanted to explain the above, because I wanted to make it clear that I am no fan of DRM. Actually, just about anyone that knows anything about it, is no fan of it.

I was intrigued when I stumbled on a project known as "Defective By Design." The idea was to highlight the products that are responsible for creating the current DRM quagmire. While I think this is a great idea (hence the "A" for effort in the title...), it looks like it has degenerated already.

Rather than going after the real culprits, the source files at the iTunes store, and other music provider's sites, they are focusing on the hardware. They have decided to tag every and any player that supports DRM in any way shape of form. Take the SanDisk Sansa for example. The player can be loaded with mp3's in a drag and drop fashion. In addition, it also will play back DRM files. It's entirely up to the user, and some folks like the "all-you-can-eat" monthly subscriptions of Napster and Rhapsody. Unfortunately, they tagged every music player out there including the Zune, the iPod, and even a Sony notebook computer!

If they want to really fix the problem, perhaps highlighting this on their website, or organizing an iTunes boycott is the answer. We can't blame a media player manufacturer for not making their player able to work with as many file formats out there, even if some of them are kind of flawed.

Here's to open source audio formats, like "ogg," but not to "Defective By Design."

--Jonas