Cory Doctorow talking to Microsoft about DRM

Cory Doctorow, sci-fi author and EFF-dude, [spoke to Microsoft about DRM and why it sucks.][1] This is one of the best summaries of why DRM is so colossally bad. From a MSFT standpoint:

None of your customers want you to make expensive modifications to your products that make backing up and restoring even harder. And there is no moment when your customers will be less forgiving than the moment that they are recovering from catastrophic technology failures.

He also makes the excellent point that anti-circumvention law (aka the DMCA) allows copyright holders to invent new copyright law as they wish. He gives the example that there’s no copyright law that disallows purchasing copyrighted goods from other countries and using them here. The DMCA, however, prevents you from taking a French DVD and using it here. Luckily, for music, there’s AllOfMP3, a Russian site that sells you music in your choice of formats. It’s legal in Russia, so it’s legal to buy and use here.

[1]: http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt “”