Yahoo offers DRM-free music, sort of

A story on Slashdot notes that Yahoo is now selling one (yes, one) MP3 without digital rights management shackles. The best comment I saw:

This isn’t a marketing ploy to pretend to be anti-DRM when they are not, and this is not being done because they “want to work on other stuff”. This is being done because DRM free music is the only way Yahoo and company can break into the monopoly iTunes has over the iPod, which itself has a near monopoly on MP3 players.

As for why I said “sort of,” this comment explains:

If John Q. Moron decides to fileshare, he’ll soon be indicted by a thousand copies of “Jessica Loves John Q. Moron” floating around. You might add that they were being slightly clever by selling this crude copy protection measure as a value added feature.

Not entirely accurate, since only first names are used, but it’s still a very clever “soft” way to limit sharing.