Tech that's just wrong

DRM: Don't Ruin Music
There are three words that strike terror into the hearts and ears of any self-respecting audiophile: Spice Girls comeback? Pop Idol winner? Happy hardcore compilation? Worse: digital rights management.

Digital rights management is, for our purposes, code that is buried in files to prevent them from being played where the seller doesn't want to be. With the music industry floundering in the wake of the digital revolution like an oil tanker being overtaken by a fleet of tiny speedboats, DRM was a desperate attempt to plug the leaks below decks. The problem is, when we buy a song, we want to own that song.

We want to listen to it whenever and wherever we want, whether it's in our house, on our laptop or on the bus. What we don't want is to pay for a song only to discover that we can only listen to it on certain types of MP3 players, between the hours of 4.31am and 9.17am every other day, before it installs a rootkit on our computer and then deletes itself.