The Future of My Digital Rights

As most of ya'll know I'm a music fanatic, but did you know I occasionally am an Apple freak. I love my powerbook and my various evolutions of Ipods. Don't get me wrong you can do pretty much everything on a PC too, but Apple is just so, dare I say it, user friendly!

My Apple products have always been easy and fast to use. And I'm never really worried about it catching some sort of crazy virus (that PC always seem to encounter) either. Plus Apple is SO creative about their products and how they go about launching them. Indeed they are a marketing machine/dream to aspire to be…

But unfortunately things might start to get real ugly, real quick for Apple and Itunes over digital rights management. This involves my favorite subject – MUSIC. Digital Rights Management (also referred to in the media industry as DRM) is the process that Apple and other companies use to a. license the music we download from big music companies and b. controls how we use that music once it’s been downloaded.

In lay terms this means that once the music is purchased and downloaded, that music downloaded (MP4 file) can only play it on a certain number of computers and/or burn it to a an audio CD a certain number of times.

Apple in my humble opinion seems to have done a very ethical and fair job of DRM. They’ve been fair to the big music companies and artists with the licensing agreements for the music. I’m just sad they can’t license everything out there (see some people don’t want to play fair still).

Plus the consumers are winning too. You can download exactly what you want - one song or the whole album. Gone are the days of buying an entire album just to listen to track #4 (again and again).

All this being said, I’m not trying to advertise or promote the use of Itunes. I’m just trying to get us all to contemplate the benefits of how they manage their current DRM and the effects this could have on our future downloading habits. I believe it’s an interesting debate with our current growth toward technology.

Who knows where it will lead to, but let me know your thoughts. Or you can check out what Mr. Steve Jobs has to say about this subject...