I really like boing boing (oh, this has nothing to do with baseball), and I think Digital Rights Management is a fiasco, so when I read this post about the DRM at iTunes being cracked I should have felt excited. But instead I felt a little dirty.
If you don’t like the license agreement at iTMS you can go someplace else. They’re a store, and to say that they’re “evil” for selling stuff is dopey.
And to set out to crack their defense because they believe you’re a sleazy person who doesn’t want to pay for what the creator would like you to pay for (so you steal it) is certainly immoral.
If you’re a cracker and want to beat the iTMS DRM more power to you. But the issue here is one of license. Buy some songs at iTMS and they own the encoding, buy them at eMusic.com and you own them. While that isn’t a solution, it does point to a solution that I think works pretty clearly and fairly:
If you make something you get to sell it, and you get to set the rules. If you really don’t want people to copy your digital stuff you better have some sort of DRM encoding. And they get to choose not to buy it because they think DRM sucks. Or only listen to it on the radio, or in clubs.
That seems fair to me.