Whenever a story about music appears - like the one I just commented on below - an RIAA troll is sure to follow. In the comments, I found this:

DRM has never prevented people from paying for music. DRM does prevent people from illegally turning one purchased item into dozens of free give-away items. DRM does have the potential to discourage people who intend to illegally distribute protected music from buying protected music.

The commenter must know 2, maybe 3 people. There's a lot of music I haven't purchased due to DRM. There are tons of issues with it, too - just witness the problems surrounding the abandonment of DRM schemes by MS and Wal-Mart. Suddenly, unless you have the time to rip it all to CD, your music is unplayable. Heck, even with Apple's less onerous DRM there are problems.

When we first bought the Mac Mini (years ago now), the HD died on us. There went all the music. I had two options: call Apple (as it happened, they did allow us to re-download, with a warning that they might not in the future), or rip the music off the iPod using "illegal" software. The latter wasn't a full answer; the iPod had my music, but not my daughter's. Then there's the "five computer" limit, which the RIAA thinks is too generous. We went over that limit, even after telling a couple of machines to de-authorize. Now I have to de-authorize every machine except the main host and start over.

So yeah, DRM never stopped anyone. Except average people - and I don't mean me. Last week, I was at the gym with my wife. It's the gym with the therapy pool, so it's heavy on retired people. As I'm changing in the locker room, I overhear 2 older gentlemen lamenting the fact that their iTunes music is limited to 5 machines. They didn't know much about DRM, but they knew they hated it - and they were glad to hear about the DRM-free Amazon store that integrates nicely with iTunes. I may not be an average music listener, but these older guys were - and the RIAA has no idea how much they've ticked people off...

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