Society: Why DRM is Stinky

Defective By Design - This is a great ad, I hope lots of people see it. This is why I'm so against DRM (Digital Rights Management). It used to be when you bought a copy of something, you owned it. You could do whatever you wanted with it, other than make copies for other people. You were even allowed to show it to other people, just so long as you retained ownership of your copy. Even then, you could resell it to someone else. Not any more, if the companies using DRM have their way. They don't even want you owning it within your own library for too long, they'd rather you have to liscence it to keep listening to it year after year.

Sigh. I could go on, but... The good news is DRM is fairly easy to defeat for the geeks out there. Every piece of DRM that has been written has either been broken or will be, it's the nature of the software. You can't give someone the lock and the key to play the music or movie with, no matter how well you disguise the key, before someone figures out how to make copies of the key.