At long last, that draconian bastard child of the music industry, Digital Rights Management (DRM), is dead.

For quite a while now I have bemoaned how this stupid system shouldn’t even exist, and Sony BMG, the last hold out in the seemingly never-ending fight, has given in.

For those who don’t fully grasp why this is a good thing, this was the nasty little bugger that made it so if you bought a song on iTunes, you couldn’t play it on a Zune, and vice-versa.  The real battle to end DRM began on February 6th, 2007, Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, wrote an open letter to the music industry entitled “Thoughts On Music“.   He basically said DRM had to be removed to free the consumers, and for his troubles, some music companies pulled their content from the company.

Here we are, 11-months later, and all of the music companies have finally bowed to the pressure.  How ironic that they scoffed at Jobs, and then learned he was actually more in touch with what the consumers wanted.  What a wild concept!

DRM still exists in the world of movies, and was part of the reason I chose HD DVD over Blu-ray, but hopefully the movie studios will see this and realize that consumers don’t want to be tied down by silly security that serves no one but the corporate overlords of the entertainment companies.

Good-bye DRM, we won’t miss you.