You may have read about how Apple, in its benevolence, is finally releasing its entire music catalogue in a digital rights management-free format – i.e., you can copy them freely as you see fit. Sounds great (especially from the perspective of Apple’s marketing humanoids): a stylish cutting edge tech company finally breaking the music industry out of its stupid addiction to crippled formats.

Well, it was – of course – too good to be true: the files may let you copy them freely, but they also contain personal information to allow anyone who cares to look to identify you (or at least, your iTunes customer details). What that inevitably means is frivolous lawsuits aplenty for anyone whose iTunes files somehow find there way onto a file sharing site.

To summarise:

• copyright is broken when it comes to personal copying and use of music and video
• the music industry still doesn’t understand its own market, even a little bit, and is waging war on its own customers
• Apple is just as much of a money-grubbing sellout of a company as Sony, Microsoft, and all those ‘bad’ companies despite its constant attempts to show how “different” it is

Guess which music download service I will continue not using?

(thanks to Karloskar).