Andrew Orlowski of the Register (UK) managed to speak to former mp3.com owner Michael Robertson (who seems to get more press now than he did when he ran mp3.com).

You'll want to read the Complete Story because Orlowski is entertaining as usual, comparing DRM (digital rights management) to Jonestown, among other things.

The issue -- KaZaA has been ruled legal, so why pay for restricted music? If I 'steal' music from KaZaA I get all this music, but if I pay I have all these restrictions.

But here are some Robertson quotes:

"It seems kind of crazy to me, the economics don't make sense. Why are all these guys like Microsoft and Wal-Mart rushing into a business where the industry leader says 'we cannot make money with the contracts that we have'?"

"If one company got a huge market share - say 50 per cent or higher - they could negotiate better royalty rates," notes Robertson. "But they forget something. The music industry is tens of thousands of publishers and just five major record labels. Getting all of them to agree is a real tough thing to accomplish even if you're market leader."

Overall, says Robertson, P2P is here for good, like it or not, and CDs aren't going away anytime soon either.

The future of DRM schemes, copy-protection and limited-use plans?

"This is a race where the winner gets shot in the head."

agreed why buy DRM technology when you can buy or get non DRM technology and have more capabilities to do things with it

that fact that iTunes.com is the RIAA's bitch is enough to piss me off, but DRM takes the cake. Microsoft wants to implement it in their future operating systems; I bet Linux will get bigger as a result of Microsoft's future.

Good article George!

I have some funny slogans they can use..
Wal*Mart - ALWAYS- trying to sell you downloads you don't need.

Micro$oft - "What can we bill you for today?"

AltNet- "Hey, new and improved music service...you can now PAY for songs you used to get for free."

as I said many times before, information is neither a product nor a service. you can not develop technology and at the same time restrict the flow of information to make it "excludable", so that people have to pay for it.

Since technology moves forward, not backward, any successful implementation of DRM in society becomes less and less likely. In fact, if you go further into the future, the probability of DRM ever being successful approaches zero.

Here's what the future does look like:
Anything that can be seen, heard, or digitally stored in one place, can be copied an infinite number of times and made accessible to every living person everywhere else, at almost no cost.

Copyright and intellectual property are only an illusion; the only reason they still matter is because they are ill-defined. As soon as an attempt is made to absolutely define what intellectual property means, a logical contradiction will occur which will nullify the whole concept.

Basically, it all comes down to one group of people coercing another, larger group of people to pay money for nothing. This system is unstable and it will fail.

-Information is free, deal with it.

I'm working with my Linux now to see if there's any software that can play and copy my media on that platform. soon as I get it taken care of, I'm reformatting and putting Red Hat on my system

If the winner gets shot in the head, I hope the entire staff of the RIAA comes in a first place tie.

Yeah that would be cool, then they will be dead!

DRM will never work, why?
because information has a way of getting free, because it wants to be free.

DRM will never work because it assumes no one is smarter than the person who wrote the DRM.

If you make a law, someone will break it, if you write a code, someone will crack it, nothing is static, nothing is permanent. Nothing is completely secure, DRM will be cracked and overwritten within 60 days of it's release, people are just waiting in line to crack that one.