Well, that ‘s what they say, anyway. This has been in the works for a while, but now looks like it might actually happen.

DRM – “Digital Rights Management” – is how the media companies (mainly music and video) restrict your use of products you purchase from them. Like where you buy a song on-line and you are allowed to play it three times over three days on two devices sold by four manufacturers…very silly.

Having an iPod that plays only music bought from iTunes fits this scenario. While you can mess with an iPod and get past some of that, you shouldn’t have to. It’s like I go in to a music store and buy a CD from a band, and that band is promoted by Sony, so now the CD only plays in CD players sold by Sony. Would any of us put up with that? Of course not. (Although some record companies now sell CDs with DRM built in…man, these people just don’t get it.)

Apple likes to say they are against the ‘principles’ of DRM, but they still live off it. They may be ready to loosen up, but we’ll have to see.

And the music industry wonders why they sell less music these days, and why there is so much “piracy”. Harrumph…they bring it on themselves. But this wasn’t supposed to be a rant…

Anyhow, Amazon says they will sell DRM-free music: you buy it, you own it. Play it where you want, on what you want: it’s yours. We’ll see if this actually plays out; if it does, it would be a real improvement to the current offerings. It should be better than the Napster/Rhapsody subscription model, too. At this point, it looks to be limited to MP3 files, but that is at least a start.

DailyTech has a story on it here

eWeek has a story here

CNet.com has a story here