my god, steps forward.

This is obviously the best news I have had in a very long time.

Not because I'm going to start buying music from iTunes in a large volume, but because it is, to my mind, the first indication that a major player in the music industry has made that they employ even a single person who understands the changing game. DRM free music is the first step towards acknowledging the object / content distinction.

By this I mean (if I can remember the paper I wrote last term) that technology has progressed to the point where an understanding of product as a unified object / content creation is obsolete. Music isn't a CD, or even a file anymore. It's a reproducible, object mobile entity. DRM is, to me, and attempt to enforce the obsolete unity of object and content. The idea is to keep a CD a CD, and not a music distribution tool, to be played with to the users content. This means, basically, that the music industry is finally admitting that the expectation that consumers will buy one version of a song for a CD player, another for an iPod, and one more for their zune, is insane.

And it is insane. It's so insane that the only way to keep the threat working is nuisance lawsuits that greatly inflate the supposed value of the content, or the 'intellectual property'. Luckily, someone at Apple (who was probably convinced my Norway), convinced someone at EMI, that the best way to reduce piracy is to stop selling your customers broken products.

This is a very, very good day for anyone who has been looking rationally at the future of creative products in our society, at the flaws in copyright, and at the mounting subjugation of technology and innovation to archaic and obsolete business models.

Also, another brilliant strategic move on the part of Apple, somehow managing to position itself yet again as the little guy, fighting against the system for the people, despite it's position as a dominant player is the sales of DRM burdened content online. I am in awe, as always, at how ascending into ubiquity has only caused this minimal amount of backlash for a company that defined itself by asking you to 'think different'.