Monday, July 28, 2008

Why You Shouldn't Feel Guilty for Illegal Downloading

Yahoo! announced last week that it is doing away with its music service; so what happens to all the people who used Yahoo! to buy music? The easiest way to explain things: you're screwed. If you did a lot of downloading, then you better start backing up that music on CDs and then ripping it back onto the computer, because that's about the only way to get rid of the DRM.

To all those laughing and saying that didn't happen because you use iTunes...well your time could come to. Apple makes a lot of money off their little iTunes store, but they've screwed their customers over big time in the past. They've walked away from their customers in the past, and you better believe they'll do it again if they want to focus their energies on something else.

The problem that everyone is complaining about, is, of course DRM. When you buy a song with DRM you don't really buy the song; you buy the rights to play it on your computer or iPod, but if the company wants to they can just stop supporting that DRM at any moment.

Until the music industry comes up with a better solution...like get rid of DRM entirely...then why are people supposed to stop downloading music? Piracy is the easiest and most practical way to get a lot of music; iTunes is a bit of a hassle--especially if you don't want MP4 files.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

You can download DRM-free music at AmazonMP3.com and it's usually cheaper than iTunes, too.

Scott Douglas said...

You can...but Amazon doesn't have near as many songs as iTunes...

Anonymous said...

You'd be surprised. They're closing the gap! I hear record labels want to end the iTunes monopoly so they're working with Amazon, which now sells songs from all four major record labels.

Anonymous said...

ooooooh, ALL FOUR MAJOR RECORD LABELS!!!