Originally Posted by Havelock Vetinari:
“Wow that's a surprise soem players will not play legally bought tracks? What's the damn point of DRM if the player won't play it? Seems to defeat the point of legally buying it, may as well download the illegally or buy them from allofmp3 which doesn't hold DRM.”
That's exactly the problem with DRM, for consumers it's pretty unreliable, it may or may not play properly on your equipment and even if you do have compatible kit, especially with "plays for sure" compatible players, it's still no guarantee and won't necessarily play your music "for sure", a good example is what happens when you have downloaded lots of DRM'ed music, and you need to transfer tracks to a new PC or HDD, if you can you will need to transfer the licences too, but if it's too late and all you've got is the .WMA files but not the licences you've lost your music, if you're really lucky you may be able to recover your licences online, but what if the online service you used has moved to a new server or has closed down altogether? Again, you've lost all of your music. It's all too much to worry about when all you want to do is play music..
It's also pretty useless at the new years eve party and you want to dance to some music, you could be faced with all sorts of restrictions from the number of times you can burn a track to a CD to the number of times you can transfer a track to your mp3 player which is a poor show if you only have a 1Gb memory, you might want to change your list of tracks weekly or more frequently. These restrictions are not a problem with the illegally downloaded files, also you will find the unrestricted files work with all flavours of equipment from car mp3 cd players, dvd players , not just particular portable mp3 players, and doesn't restrict you to using microsoft windows and windows media player to manage and transfer your music.