The Darker Side of DRM

by on March 23, 2006

I’ve got a new op-ed in the Salt Lake Tribune. There won’t be anything in it that’s news to regular TLF readers, but here’s how it starts:

Did you know that it’s a federal crime to listen to your music on the wrong brand of portable music player?

It’s true. At least, it is if you buy your music online. Take Apple’s iTunes Music Store, which recently sold its billionth song. Apple talks a lot about the convenience and affordability of its music, but they don’t mention its darker side: it’s only compatible with Apple products. MP3 players from other companies aren’t supported.

In a free market, that wouldn’t be so bad. Manufacturers of competing MP3 players, such as Sony, Creative and Samsung, could provide software to automatically convert the music to a compatible format. But that would be illegal, thanks to a little-known law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which Congress passed in 1998.

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Tim Lee / Timothy B. Lee (Contributor, 2004-2009) is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is currently a PhD student and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.

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