For those of you who don’t know, DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. DRM is a type of software “lock” put onto electronic media so that it cannot be copied. Unless you have a key. Some DRM allows minimal copying, so that you can copy one time, or onto a particular type or brand of hardware.

What this means is that if you buy a DRM-protected song online you cannot copy it to your Zune, or Ipod, or to a CD without the key. No problem, right? You paid for the song, you have the key, you can copy your music. But what happens when the company you bought the music from shuts down? The keys vanish and you lose control of your music. If you bought music from Yahoo! Music store, you already know this. DRM still sucks.

“Once the Yahoo store goes down and the key servers go offline, existing tracks cannot be authorized to play on new computers. Instead, Yahoo recommends the old, lame, and lossy workaround of burning the files to CD, then reripping them onto the computer. Sure, you’ll lose a bunch of blank CDs, sound quality, and all the metadata, but that’s a small price to pay for the privilege of being able to listen to that music you lawfully acquired. Good thing you didn’t download it illegally or just buy it on CD!”

This is going to be an even bigger problem with the digital television world that’s just around the corner. You’re going to purchase movies online (purchase, not rent) only to see them evaporate as the business shutters its virtual doors.

What makes this even more ridiculous is that DRM doesn’t work. People who want to pirate material break the DRM codes. The only people DRM hurts is people who want to play by the rules, like all those suckers who bought their music from Yahoo.

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