Steve Jobs calls for the end of the DRM. All who have ever purchased music on iTunes scream "hells yeah!" in unison.

I truly despise the iTunes DRM. I think iTunes as a store is a truly wonderful thing - you can browse an extensive catalog, hear snippets of songs immediately, and buy what you want immediately. For people that completely flip out when they hear something new that they like (not that I would know this from personal experience at all.... *cough*), this is just the bee's knees.

The problem arises in how the file is then authorized for your use later. From the best of my recollection, you are limited to six devices being able to use that particular file. Then (I guess), it's dead. This would be OK, if it were not for the fact that I seem to be cursed to have at least one hard drive failure a year, whether it be the hard drive on my laptop or on my iPod (usually, both go kerplunk within weeks of each other). As a result, I have now used up three of my six authorizations over just a two year period - even though I am using the same laptop and the same iPod.

The only way for me to not say goodbye to these files is to burn them as full blown audio files to a CD, then rip them back to my computer as mp3s. I cringe when thinking about how these files are going to sound after all of that.

So, someone who wants to continue to support the music industry is thereby punished for supporting the music industry, since you don't have to jump through these hoops with illegally downloaded plain ol' mp3s.

I'm just wondering why Steve Jobs is such a proponent of all this. He says iTunes' proprietary format is not incentive enough for people to continue to purchase iPods in the future, even though just about any product life cycle model would indicate that in five years, that will most likely be the case. Like, what up with that?