The San Francisco Bay Guardian ran a series of articles about digital music, iPods and the RIAA this week. Unfortunately, the Guardian’s profoundly awful archiving policy means that this URL will go stale in a week (Cheez!), so enjoy this stuff while you can. They’ve fixed their permalinks, hurrah! Here’s a bit from Annalee Newitz’s piece:
And that’s where the high-tech industry comes into the picture. Software companies, eager to lap up profits any way they can, realized there would be a huge market for programs that could be wrapped around digital media or put into players to prevent piracy. Microsoft, Apple, and RealNetworks are at the forefront of this burgeoning market with their DRM schemes for music. Apple packages iTunes songs in its Fairplay software, while RealNetworks (maker of the popular RealPlayer) has just opened a music store full of DRM-shackled songs to compete with iTunes. Microsoft markets the Media Rights Management software package and is planning to include a controversial and elaborate DRM scheme called the Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (formerly known as Palladium) in the next version of Windows.
(Thanks, Annalee!)