The RIAA is trying to engender the same level of respect for DRM that people had for the 55 mph speed limit - which is to say, none at all. Read Ron Jeffries' DRM nightmare - it's the kind of thing all of us jump through when we want to listen to music on another device that we already own:

I really wanted to play fair and pay a fair price for getting these two songs on my music player. It has taken me hours to do it, and it'll take probably ten minutes to do every time I ever do it.

Music companies: you have this wrong. You are driving honest people like me to use other means to do what they have every right to do. (I presume you would agree that having purchased these songs, I have a right to play them on my one and only music player.) I'd be happy to click and pay a buck to add a song to my player. I'm not happy to pay a buck and then leap through my own orifice.

I jump through hoops myself - when I buy from iTunes, I buy on the PC. I then burn a CD (I could use software to remove the DRM, but my method doesn't raise the specter of an RIAA lawsuit - at every step, I'm using functions supported by the music software). I take the CD and import it into my main library (and re-key in the song info - if I burn a mix of unrelated songs, the info doesn't go out to the CD).

That burns up time that I could actually be doing something useful - like, say, enjoying the music I just paid for. I'm hardly a voice in the wilderness on this: Dare Obasanjo highlighted this NY Times piece over the weekend:

Pity the overly trusting customers who invested earlier in music collections before the Zune arrived. Their music cannot be played on the new Zune because it is locked up by software enforcing the earlier copy-protection standard: PlaysFor(Pretty)Sure -- ButNotTheNewStuff.

When you get DRM'd music, you are making a bet (and not really a safe one) - that your current devices will live on. FairPlay could get buried just as quickly as PlaysForSure though, and then you would be stuck with a steaming pile of bits. Knowing this, why wouldn't you do everything you could to circumvent the protection? It's insane not to.

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