DRM Explained

Via the blog of old Well pal Bruce Umbaugh I learned of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s new publication “The Customer Is Always Wrong: A User’s Guide to DRM in Online Music.” It does a great job of picking apart the breezy claims of several leading music services. People want to be freed from the hassle of DRM, and these services know it – that’s why they make the overblown statements that the EFF has so nicely debunked.

The guide does suffer slightly from a classic defect of oppositional politics: the reader is left with a much better understanding of what’s wrong than of what’s right. The box listing four recommended music services is a start; I also would have listed Magnatune (which shares 50% of proceeds with artists and offers multiple formats including patent-free FLAC and Ogg Vorbis), Epitonic (which doesn’t sell music directly, but offers many unencumbered sample tracks) and the free Live Music Archive at archive.org (which also contains an assortment of spoken word titles).

Paul commented on Tue Sep 20 16:38:34 2005:

They’ve since added two out of my three suggestions. Sweet!