even more thoughts on thoughts on music

Even more thoughts on "Thoughts on Music"

There's one more thing I want to set straight. I hope you'll pay

attention because this is an important concept. When you buy a record

or a CD or a digital download, you are not buying that music. You

don't own Abbey Road just because you bought a copy of that recording

in some format. All you've bought is a physical device that plays that

music until the container wears out or breaks. Some of the DRM

rhetoric is akin to people buying a vinyl record, playing it for a

while, and then when it wears out, going back to the record label and

saying, "Hey, I already own this music, so gimme another record to

replace this one that wore out. Why should I have to buy it twice?"

Either that or it's akin to people saying, "I already bought this

record on vinyl and it will only play on my turntable and not on my CD

player. I mean I've tried putting it in the CD player and it's not

even the right size! How can you sell me a piece of music that locks

me in to one kind of player? And forget about putting it on my Zune! I

tried that too and there's not even a slot where you can load the

vinyl record in."

Get this straight because it's an important point. You're not getting

a perpetual license for any and all playback mechanisms when you buy a

record or a CD or when you download a song. You never were. Records

didn't play in cassette players didn't play in 8-track players didn't

play in CD players. Okay? And another thing: Music is cheap. You can

buy a copy of Abbey Road for $9.99 on Amazon. How do you argue that

this is not an amazing bargain?

Yes it would be nice if you could buy a song on iTunes and have it

play anywhere. But you don't have any constitutional right to this.

Look it up. I did. There's nothing in the Constitution or the

Declaration of Independence about digital downloads being transferable

from one machine to another. There's no law against making iTunes

songs play only on an iPod. You can go all the way back to ancient

Rome, to the Magnum Carta, and you'll see -- nothing there either.