DRM sucks

Like many Mac OS X users I received my copy of Panther on Friday and promptly set out to install it. Like a good computer user I backed everything up before doing so, even though it wasn't really necessary. I have more then one drive in my machine and I keep my home directory and all my files on a separate drive from the OS. I do this so that I can blow away the OS at any time without having to worry about re-installing anything. This is an area where Mac OS X excels. So for Panther I chose to format and install on the same drive where I had Jaguar before. Everything worked fine, and 5 minutes after finishing the OS install I had my familiar environment back in place. That is except for my music that I purchased from the iTunes music store.

You see this music has a wonderful feature called Digital Rights Management (DRM) which as far as I'm concerned exists for the sole purpose of screwing the people who actually pay for music. After installing Panther, iTunes is now complaining that my machine is not activated for my music. So even though it's the same machine, the same music and music I paid way too much money for, I can't play it without jumping through a bunch of hoops. I was perfectly knowledgeable about the restrictions associated with this music, but I was pretty sure that an OS reinstall did not require a de-activation before hand. It certainly didn't occur to me to check that before re-installing, and why should I have to? After all I did pay for the music. I'm damn pissed off about this. If I had just downloaded the music illegally it would play just fine, now I either have to burn another one of the three activations allowed for the music, or I have to go through the trouble of contacting Apple to get the previous activation for the machine released so that I can re-activate it. Neither of those options makes me the least bit happy.

DRM sucks, and the music industry sucks for foisting this crap on the people who are their customers. I had already committed to never buying any more music with DRM associated and this just reaffirms why. This is very disappointing as I'd so like to absolutely love the iTunes Music Store, but I can't and don't. What's sad is that as bad as this sucks it is still better then all the copycats that are coming out now.

So what is a music lover supposed to do? eMusic is ruined and all the other services have DRM. I do still like Rhapsody, but it's just not the same as having the music as part of a playlist in iTunes. You can't even safely buy CDs anymore because the record companies are so foolish that they're crippling those too. The record companies can be proud that they've so thoroughly screwed things up now that there really isn't even any point in paying for music now.

Posted by Kimbro Staken