DRM - A Fair Deal ?

[quicksilver]

Digital Rights Management (DRM), is something that the big companies have been playing with for years, and each time it has been greeted with dismay.
Why ? Take this example, you purchase a Compact disk and take it home to play it on your computer, so you can transfer it to your portable device
(MP3 player,Minidisk, Diskman etc).
Uh oh the computer refuses to allow this saying you cannot carry out this operation .
Hardly fair is it, you paid your hard earned cash and now they want more money, to force you to obtain another copy in a format that will work .
This is blatantly wrong, and greedy.
A better idea has been put forward by a consortium (see the link), to allow you to register a device (comp, portable player, etc) and be able to transfer your purchased products seemlessly from one platform to the other .
This is a much fairer system, to all. The rights owner is happy , the consumer is happy and so is your wallet.

http://www.drmwatch.com/standards/article.php/3461921

I,m sure there are many hurdles to get past , but its a start in recognising that we have the right to listen to our purchased products, without being branded criminals for using third party software, that makes purchases available to play on our own portable players.

[ProgRocker]

DRM has been quite a bone of contention between The Entertainment Cartel and consumers in recent years. This includes CDs with various copy-protection schemes (clever insertion of errors into the disc to make it unrippable), and the dizzying array of incompatible proprietary music file formats (iTunes tracks being a glaring example). You pay for something that should be enjoyed on any platform, but unfortunately, it's use is severly limited. In some cases, the purchased media cannot be played at all.

The bigger problem with this is that DRM has greatly restricted the personal fair use copying that has long been a part of consumer rights. For decades, consumers have been allowed to copy music for personal use. The U.S. Copyright statute contains a provisionexpressly paving the way for "personal, non-commercial copying." Even the RIAA has admitted the legitimacy of consumers' personal copying:

If you choose to take your own CDs and make copies for yourself on your computer or portable music player, that's great. It's your music and we want you to enjoy it at home, at work, in the car and on the jogging trail.

Just what fair use is and isn't needs to be more clearly defined, either by the courts or by Congress. Bills have been introduced to do just that, but so far have gone nowhere.

Cheers.

[battye]

Surely this just encourages the use of P2P programs. Who wants to go out and buy a CD to come home to find that when they try to rip it to their mp3 player that copyright protection is in their way? By using a P2P program you can download the mp3, listen to it, make sure it's the right song (ok there's a downside, you might not get what you thought you got), rip it to your mp3 player. Da da! You saved $20 buying that album because you liked that one song on it, and it plays on your mp3 player / portable devices.

[quicksilver]

I hope all these good points, are bourne in mind by those that enact standards and regulations.
The consortium mentioned above, has some of the biggest equipment manufacturer names behind it so this seemed to me, to be a better way forward,
for those endeavouring to stay on the right side of the legal fence.