This day will be long remembered: Apple’s iTunes Store no longer sells music with “digital rights management” restrictions attached.
The move, announced in January at the Macworld Expo convention, formally terminates the recording industry’s dream of selling music with “DRM” that would prevent all unauthorized uses.
I’ve been looking forward to this moment for a long time. A round of thanks are appropriate: to Apple for being the first mass-market computer firm to debunk DRM’s utility in public; to Amazon for launching an MP3-only, DRM-free download store; to the big record labels for finally recognizing that DRM couldn’t be made to work; to the little record labels for not asking for DRM in the first place.
