Why I Hate Legal Downloads (part 1)

The first reason for my hatred of things like Napster, My Coke Music, iTunes and so on is the fact that they all use proprietary file formats. The only reason for that, as far as I can tell, is that they don't trust us to not pirate them, so they go for formats caked in Digital Rights Management evilness, just so that they can control what you can do with what you've just paid for. I could pay 99p for a WMA file that I wouldn't be able to play on anything other than one PC. On a daily basis I use about five different PCs, and I spend an hour in my car. A WMA file tied to one PC is pretty lame.

Plus I have two MP3 players. They don't play WMAs. My DVD player plays MP3s, not WMAs. MP3s aren't as good as OGG Vorbis, for fidelity or for patent freedom, but they're better than WMAs because the standard is open, even if there is the patent licensing fear hanging over peoples heads for commerial use.

It's like they treat us like criminal wannabes from the start. They don't trust us not to copy the files around. If you download songs from Napster, you get to listen to them for as long as you remain a Napster subscriber - you don't make a payment, you lose your song. That's extortion, as far as I'm concerned!

This is precisely the reason I won't use music download services until they start providing what we deserve. Digital Rights Management is all about stripping your rights away and helping to line the pockets of the rich and greedy with more cash, whilst simultaneously doing as little work as possible to do it.