Comments on: What if Apple stopped issuing DRM keys?

Sure, it's highly unlikely now, but what about 5 or 10 years from now? The fact is, consumers of DRM-laden music are at the mercy of whoever holds their encryption keys.

[OmegaWolf747]

This is why I refuse to buy anything under DRM lock. It places you at the mercy of the company. The stuff I buy should be 100% mine, not theirs. Amazon.com doesn't DRM their music and it's priced competitively. Let's give them our business!

[Jonathan]

Its called a class action lawsuit guys. And expect a metric **** ton of them in the next decade as crap like Steam based games start turning off their authentication servers. This is why I've started to replace the 200ish songs I got off of iTunes with Amazon.com's MP3's. I'm seriously eyeballing a different PMP in the future simply because Crapple refuses to place real storage in their iPod Touch. I have a 160GB iPod Classic that I just purchased. Upgrading from my 60GB iPod Photo and frankly the classic's UI is crap now a days. I expect better from the touted KING of GUI's. The UI is slow. To get back to having an active backlight I need to hit a button that takes me to a location in the UI that I don't want and then there is that damn screen saver, which is Apple's way of adding battery life: by hindering the user from seeing what is playing. Brilliant guys. How damn hard would it have been to add an option in your settings to turn this off? But god forbid you give user's a choice. Morons. I have 60GB of music. The rest of that 160GB drive is composed of my fav movies. Meanwhile the touch has this pathetic 32GB max of storage. Dear Apple. Drop a 160GB hard drive in there and 1GB of cache. The drive will hardly ever spin up and you will have a real PMP, not this neutered thing that is the Touch.
Getting back to music, I've stopped buying ANY DRMed music. So I don't get locked into any one player down the road or run into the problem of what if the company stops authenticating systems.
Its just simpler that way.

[streamOG]

You can't sue after you agree to the Terms Of Service. That's the reason it's there. Don't think your fooling anyone with your threats.

[Aepervius]

Actually, you can in many countries if the term of service goes against the local consumer protection law. In many countries you can't give up a right given to you by law.

[DrtyDogg]

"You can't sue after you agree to the Terms Of Service"
That is the exact reason it is there, so people will believe that.

[paras_bikram]

i read a a similar article posted on Streaming Media Magazine- it seems that the CNET "author" GREG,"keep your eyes on your own work" SANDOVAL- with limited imagination and understanding of the topic- basically lifted the info and idea for the story from this other "story".

For real news and understanding of media info, folk are better off just going to the source:

http://streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=10551


where does CNET get these guys anyway? folk with no ideas of their own...sad, pathetic and worst of all- unoriginal. way to make things on CNET worse- GREG.

[wbowblis]

I have one criticism. I see no reason that there should be a reduction in quality in copying the music to CD. It should be the same codec that you use to listen, so it should be the same. There will be a quality hit if you recompress (to mp3, wma, ogg, etc), however. Ripping to a wav format should also be transparent.

[Rick3904]

I think what you say is true, but most folks that would copy a bought from itunes to a CD would likely be re-ripping it to put it back on their iPod, so there would be some quality loss.
All the more reason to NEVER buy anything with DRM on it1