1 Um, how come you have a "more" link but there's no more? Can I help "bring about the heat death of the universe" in my capacity as Linkmistress of Chaos? Dang, now I'm going to be late for work! :(

2 There's more, you just can't get to it... Now there's a bug if ever I saw one. Or at least a misfeature. Run, Susie, run!

3 Hi...it's me. Thank you for inviting me to get off Blogsplat and into the real world. Just tell me what I need to do...and, bear in mind that I am a computer-illiterate blonde. I can't even fix my stupid template. Linking from Blogspot gives me pin-point bleeds in my brain. I downloaded MT once and didn't get anywhere with it. Of course, at the time I was using a computer that was at least 10 years old. I'd like to try it again. Honestly, I'm starting to feel like a blog on blogspot is like cubic zirconia. Pretty, but not real. Besides, in the not-too-distant-future, I fear there'll only be me and a few crickets left at blogspot. In case it doesn't show up for you and you need it, my email address is srv200163 at Yahoo dot com. Thank you again and I sincerely hope my ineptitude doesn't make you regret this... (I gotta go warn Ted that I'm probably gonna need his help with this.)

4 The "play it and record it again" trick is called "the analog hole" by the recording industry. DRM is specifically designed to deal with this. It works like this: you get your music and play it, re-record it, write a nice unprotected MP3... and nobody can listen to your new MP3, because DRM machines won't play media that doesn't have a DRM authorization. Obviously, if they did allow old MP3s to play, the analog hole would remain open and the entire system would quickly implode, just as you described. A full-bore DRM machine will not run unauthorised programs. Authorised programs will not open unauthorised media. That's how it works. Sorry...

5 Good point. So either (a) we need to fake DRM (which will be illegal, if it isn't already) or (b) we need to keep our old machines that actually work. Mind you, a full-strength universal DRM requires a level of totalitarian government and big-business control that is utterly terrifying far beyond the mere inability to play music when we want to. As I said, the backers of DRM are evil. I wasn't engaging in hyperbole - these people want to control your thoughts. Literally. I think you at least realise that. This needs more though than I can give it right now. I'll come back to it soon.

6 So either (a) we need to fake DRM (which will be illegal, if it isn't already) or (b) we need to keep our old machines that actually work. Faking DRM is pretty hard - the core of it uses something called public key encryption, which, if properly implemented, is essentially unbreakable. The implementation will certainly have some flaws which could be exploited, but as those flaws are discovered, they would be fixed. Eventually, it would not be practical to fake it out. Older machines (or, for that matter, Linux machines) will serve you well until they are no longer able to connect to the internet. In my opinion, DRM will eventually be required by the ISPs before they let you on. You could still play your own music files, but you would no longer be able to trade them.

7 We need a common blog for this :) As you say, DRM builds on public key encryption. But that in itself is not enough. With public key encryption, you can do one of two things: encrypt something with someones public key so that only they can read it, or encrypt something with your own private key so that others can verify that it came from you. Now, where are these keys going to come from? People can't be allowed to make their own, as they'll just share them when they need to share files. And you'd have to rely on people keeping and never losing their key. It would be a nightmare for the media companies. No, it's going to be implemented in hardware like DVD region codes, and kept as a trade secret. (Patents won't work - though aspects of it will be patented. Copyright is completely useless.) So every machine that can play digital media - everything from watches to phones to cars to fridges - has to be replaced with a DRM-locked version. And that trade secret has to remain secure and unhacked or the whole thing is screwed. As for the analog hole: The only way to block it is to take away - forever - many things that people can do right now and indeed have been able to do for years, things that are taken as very basic functionality in a huge variety of devices. Rather than preventing people releasing their own DRM'd stuff copied through the analog hole, they could instead track this - if they had a global registry of every DRM-capable recording device and who owned each one. As I said before, the really scary part is not DRM itself, but the level of legislation and policing required to make it leakproof. George Orwell was a piker compared to these guys. tom beta 2's point on opponents is a good one: China and Taiwan and many developing countries have a rather relaxed view of copyright laws and would love to build a profitable industry selling DRM circumvention devices.

8 We need a common blog for this Aw, what the heck. It's easy to cut-and-paste. You made a good point about embedded keys. I don't know exactly how DRM would address this problem. If they do embed keys, they are going to have to deal, somehow, with these keys being uncovered. As I understand it, users have keys, too. They are tied to your name and credit card, and are used to originally purchace the copyrighted work. If you trade away your key, your name and card go with it... WRT overseas competition, that goes away as soon as DRM becomes part of the law. Just as nobody tries to sell radios that aren't FCC compliant, nobody will try to sell non-DRM hardware, either. Even if they did, it, like the older hardware, would probably be excluded from the internet anyway.