Next Gen DRM

Everyone's familiar with DRM, Digital Rights Management. It's the bane of music pirates' existance, and, while I do support paying artists for the music I want to listen to, is there a point where we are just taking it to far? The DRMG, Digital Rights Management Group is now discussing a new plan that would almost surely destroy open-source music formats, and institute a mandate that all portable-audio players, home media centers and software media players must check every song for proper DRM before allowing it to be transferred to the device, or played in the software. What does this mean for us? Well, say I pay my 99 cents, and download a song on iTunes. I'm allowed to burn that song to say, 3 CDs, and store one copy locally, and have no other digital version anywhere outside of those 3 CDs and 1 file. Now say I lose the file, it gets deleted, I have to reformat my hard drive, or I buy a new computer. I can't transfer that song from the file to another format because it's copyright protected against such actions. I can't rip the CD to MP3 because the new software media players won't allow ripping to "non-copyrighted" formats such as LAME MP3 encoding. So now I'm stuck. I have no way to get that song back into my MP3 collection except to pay another 99 cents to Apple. There's a point where things just get rediculous. We're almost at that point. I believe that the final straw for unprotected music encoding will come with the release of Windows Vista, which will include, in the operating system, DRM protection devices that prevent running unprotected CD Rippers, DVD ripping/backup software or CD/DVD duplication software. We're at the point that they're trying to hard to crack down on the pirates, and they're enforcing too many restrictions on the purchasers of legal music. As long as there are still music stores, I'd rather go to the mall, pay my 17 dollars and buy the CD, then pay 99 cents a track and download a crippled song that if I lose, I'm dead. That's all I have for now. When I find something interesting, I'll blog it.