What is this DRM Thing Anyway?

I've been downloading a lot of music through amazon.com lately and I noticed they are pushing that the music you get from them is 'DRM Free."

Now, I know what DRM is but I tend to follow such things. It occurred to me that many people have no idea what DRM means both as an acronym and for themselves.

DRM is and acronym for "Digital Rights Management." Digital Rights Management is a push by the entertainment industry to control digital media. The most common form of this media is MP3s, but DRM also works on other media including video files. Basically, it's encryption that only lets you say, play an audio file, on an authorized device, an authorized number of devices or even an authorized number of times.

DRM could be used to limit your number of plays on a certain music file or even to charge per play.

You see, the concept that the media industry likes to push is that you don't own music. Even when you buy a CD you don't own the songs on that CD. What you own is a piece of plastic that authorizes you to listen to those songs as the RIAA deems fit. That piece of plastic also happens to have those songs on it. In the eyes of the RIAA, ripping your CDs yourself is actually illegal since you're not authorized OT listen to music in that manner.

The largest peddler of DRM music is Apple with iTunes. iTunes music will only play on the iTunes player it's been authorized for on iPods it's been authorized to play on. Don't get me wrong now, I'm not trashing the iPod, in fact, I'd recommend the iPod if you want a nucer music player. i just don't recommend buying your music through iTunes. Get it from Amazon.com or some other DRM free music distributor and import it into iTunes.

So what is DRM free? It's just that, it has no encryption. You can copy it as much as you want to any number of computers and players that you want. Now, the tracks do contain some tracking information so you're not going to want to freely distribute these tracks to all your friends or worse, anonymous internet people with file sharing programs. But you can play them on pretty much any portable music player, including the iPod and copy them around to any of your laptops and PCs to listen at work or while traveling.

So when building your Digital Music library, be sure to shop smart and be aware of the possible pitfalls you may get into down the road.