DMG
Piracy is the Safe Route
In the last few years, Wallmart, Sony, Major League Baseball, and even Microsoft have had to kill off their DRM systems, leaving customers stranded in a painful spot: go through tedious, time-consuming steps to convert the music and video they bought into other formats, or lose that music entirely. (In the case of Major League Baseball, there was no conversion option, and fans lost everything they'd paid for.)
Over and over and over again, loyal customers who've tried to play by the rules have gotten burned while pirates have been completely unaffected. Pirates can play their pirated movies and music on any device they want. They can play them on their iPods, high-definition TV sets, cellphones, and any computer in their houses or cars. They can loan those files to friends, use them as ringtones, and embed them in web pages. And they do it all for free.
Me, Mr. Nice Guy, I have to pay $1 every time I want to use an iTunes track as a ringtone, and I only get to use thirty seconds of it.
Readers' Comments
I think all this micro-scale copyright infringement actually *helps* the music business, but it's still technically illegal, so the companies drive themselves and their customers nuts trying to stamp it out, not realizing they're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I keep buying from iTunes for the convenience. But that's really wearing thin, especially for video. DVDs are still a great package: I don't have to store them on a hard drive somewhere, I can loan them to friends, and I can take them anywhere and they'll play. Can't do that with iTunes videos.