The Huffington Post | The Blog

Holy crap, are you kididng me?

Hillary Rosen bitching about lack of interoperability in the iPod?

That is a huge turnaround from what I thought she’d be saying. It would seem to me (as she’s spent a lot of years trying to tell me that digital music piracy is going to rob me of hearing the next Chrisbritneytina AguiJessica Simpspears) that she’d be all about something that locks you into using your own CD’s or music you purchase from iTunes.

Here’s where the whole thing falls apart:

DRM. Hillary, the reason you can’t buy stuff from any other site that sells you MP3′s is that companies like Napster are DRM-ing the crap out of the music so that the RIAA can’t sue them for aiding and abetting pirates. Take the DRM out of the picture, and you can throw MP3′s at the iPod all day long. Sure, you can’t play WMA (or whatever format MS is using this week), but who really wants to? They sound like crap anyway.

/sigh. How many times must I say this?

Sell me the right to use my music in anyway I choose. Once I own a copy of the song, I own it, and I can do whatever I want with it. Make an MP3, copy it to cassette, scribe it in clay, burn it to a CD. Don’t “license” the digital file to me. Don’t make me buy it over and over as formats change. Just send me a letter saying I own “Pretty Hate Machine” and that I can do whatever I want with it.