HAHAHA
"None of the other services have this real good individual rights wise DRM."
None of them NEED "individual" DRM technologies. Just about every other digital content delivery service on the Net, along with over 28 million different products are using the DRM technologies integrated into Microsoft's Windows Media Player.
Microsoft patents, Nos. 6,330,670 and 6,327,652, are entitled “Digital Rights Management Operating System” and “Loading and Identifying a Digital Rights Management Operating System.” They were issued in December 2001 but were filed by Microsoft in October 1998.
HMMM... Will the industry as a whole go with someone who's been working the DRM issue since at least 1997, or some "Stevie Come Lately" who in less than a year has changed his tune from "It's fun to be a pirate, let's rip, mix & burn" to "We want to sell YOUR music,please?"
Geee...it's a no-brainer which way the industry went...
"DRM might be the critical issue. "The question is, what are the music labels actively supporting ? Because if digital rights management isn't a part of it, then it's certainly not the direction that the music industry's going. In fact, [open-source developers] are proponents of unprotected codecs."
However, said Kevorkian, the major record labels are experimenting more actively with CD content protection technologies that include both a protected set of Red Book audio files -- the standard audio CD file format -- plus Windows Media Audio files, which are protected so that you'd be able to transfer them to your PC's hard drive but not distribute them online."
"Also," she said, "as the music industry supports paid music services more actively, we expect the majority of paid music services to support Windows Media Audio because the codec and the DRM are closely integrated, so every music service provider doesn't have to think about combining the two like Apple did."
Whether or not open-source audio standards will threaten the dominance of MP3 and WMA remains to be seen. Open-source audio developers -- opposed by aggressive commercial giants, ideologically committed to nonprofit but needing development capital -- seem to face unbeatable odds."
There you have it... The industry has made it's choice...
"Windows Media Audio because the codec and the DRM are closely integrated".
