If I bought DRM’d music, I could have it now. If I wait a few days, I can have it DRM free. This applies as much to obscure artists on indie labels as it does to top 40 hits: even so-called ‘enhanced’ CDs are close enough to Red Book spec that you can rip the guts out of them to beautiful lossless FLAC files without much difficulty.

That’s what’s so bloody illogical about this whole conundrum: I can still get content in better-than-iTunes quality without DRM. I just can’t have it now.

Why not just let me have it now as an MP3 (OGG or FLAC would be nicer, but I’d settle for less ;-)) whilst I wait for the CD to arrive? What about this model doesn’t make sense? I would buy so much more music if licensers played to my at-computer (or, in this case, in-room at-radio) impulse buying tendencies. I doubt they’re ever going to get it.

And I give it two weeks after going to market until it’s cracked. Plus it’s hardly as though it takes particulary advanced technology to manually circumvent copy controls: whilst we’ve still got analogue I/O for our digital devices, it’s perfectly possible to circumvent pretty much any DRM technology out there, cracking efforts aside. Got a line-in on your soundcard? Got a TV tuner with S-Video or Composite input? There’s your home piracy studio.

And if we can do it, the only people you’re fooling when you say it’s not possible are your investors: the professional pirates are yards ahead of you.

(Gosh this post makes me sound like a raving Marxist, doesn’t it?)

Anyway, the point is DRM is only ever going to succeed in a limited capacity. Then, the masses will revolt and overthrow the bourgeoisie oppressors and their control of a false commodity! Socialist order will rule!! erm. Then, circumvention will become the norm, rather than a temporary force. Innovation will be out-innovated. Until DRM is at the point where hardware is in some kind of stasis, and software can be updated at the whim of content purveyors. I don’t say creators, because content’s creators aren’t generally the ones heavily pushing the agenda we’re seeing from various recording lobbies — and also because I do find myself agreeing that the ownership of ideas is a fundamentally flawed concept.

Aside: I think this fits without difficulty into my political views — Liberalism follows the principle of government/legislative intervention only where this is seen to be of greater benefit (e.g. where there is no privately operated/owned alternative to state-owned/operated infrastructure/services)… and the notion that individuals rather than the state be creators of wealth is fairly irrelevant here, because there’s no defined need in liberalism for the creation of wealth in all spheres, plus the present intellectual property climate that we see exists because of legislative (read: government) intervention in matters best left to free market forces. I’ll stop myself from launching into a full-scale rant here… hopefully some other time.

So, I think SanDisk are digging themselves a hole. Rant over.