digital music.... FairPlay or UnfairPlay??

The music industry has definitely been an ever evolving one, and we have definitely come a long way from cassettes to “the more recent old days, when it happened on Napster, Kazaa, LimeWire, BitTorrent, and even YouTube”. But  a recent controversy has arisen with the piracy of music, no longer can music be “shared” through an online source such as napster, now to legitimately own music you must purchase a digital version of a track . Now the new generation of website from where we can procure music is Amazon and iTunes. Itunes has definitely taken the lead in the online music distribution industry, and in doing so they have also developed a way to protect the rights of the music they are selling, they have used.

“Digital Rights Management, usually known by the spine-tinglingly thrilling abbreviation DRM. What's DRM? An invisible layer of software that bodyguards a computer file and limit what you can and can't do with it. Buy a song from Apple's iTunes Media Store, for example, and you can copy the file to five computers but no more. That's because the song comes with Apple's DRM software, FairPlay, baked in, and FairPlay has its own ideas about what is and isn't fair.”  This can definitely seem unfair to any iTunes user, you have purchased the music and you should have the right to save it in as many computers as you please….. But this is looking at the situation from a user point of view; because from a business point of view, they do have the right to protect the music they are selling, and they definitely have a right to make profit from selling music, after all that’s why they are in business, to make money.

Is DMR really about protecting from piracy or is it about creating a monopoly for iTunes???

At the end of the day, new protective software can be developed, but the users will at the end find new ways to get music without paying the rights to it, it’s an ongoing cycle that will continue occurring. And the giants of the online music industry will keep growing regardless, as well as the artists themselves; people will continue purchasing merchandise related to them, especially concert tickets.

What do you think? Is FairPlay unfair or a necessary tool to control piracy?