I had an interesting thought the other day, and I haven’t heard anything about this yet from any of the media discussions on Digital Rights Management (DRM), the craptastic limitations companies like Apple put on your downloaded song and video files. You know, the ones that say things like “you may only listen to this file on three computers!” WTF? How is three the magic number between having a few computers and piracy? The day I get my fourth computer I’m screwed?

Anyway, the strategy is seriously flawed, and unfortunately people are investing serious dough in music collections, and potentially soon they’ll be doing the same for video collections. (I’ve basically switched from CDs to only buying songs on iTunes, I just make a, uh, *cough* backup mp3 copy that is DRM free). What I was wondering though, is what about inheritance rights? Are you allowed to will your $10,000 iTunes 10,000 song collection of AAC music files to your child? What about when they are ready to will them to their children, etc.? You can will a massive CD collection. But suddenly when the object becomes digital, you don’t truly own it anymore.

I expect some major lawsuits as people invest more and more in these services and then find it’s worthless when they’ve used up their magic allotment of devices that can listen to the music, or can’t will their music to their children. Plus, there are other services where you pay a fixed monthly fee and get all the music you want. What they forget to remind you about except in the fine print, is all that music is yours for only $20/month….ONLY as long as you pay for the service. What happens when that service goes bankrupt? You don’t own any of the music anymore!

I’m all for media going digital. Every book, song, TV show, movie, music video, etc. that I want to experience I should obtain digital ownership for. The medium I view it in is irrelevant. I can watch/listen to it on my cell phone, my TV/home stereo, my computer, my laptop, at a friend’s house. The media companies should get a fair payment for creating and distributing it, yes. And there needs to be some encryption/DRM to restrict me from sharing it willy-nilly on the internet. But these restrictions are pointless! The music is locked to a single vendor. There needs to be a non-profit (maybe even government or U.N. regulated/owned) clearinghouse for validation. Once I pay for a song from ANY music provider, I have some token that when I try to play that song anywhere, gets run through this clearing house to ensure I can listen to it. I don’t know if that’s the right solution. But what we have now is broken.