Burn It, baby, Burn It

Yahoo Inc. has become the latest company to abandon customers who bought tracks from its music store encoded with digital rights management (DRM), drawing fire from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

American Scofflaw
This has really gone too far. The RIAA has forced companies to set up all these DRM systems, and now that the added cost and headache of using DRM-crippled music stores is starting to force them out of business, customers are facing the possibility of being software-locked out of music they legally own. and their only alternative to preserve the music they legally bought is to do the very sort of data-copying DRM was designed to prevent in the first place!

There is another problem. As illustrated by this article, the burden of proof has been shifted onto the consumer to prove they legally own the copy of music ("your papers please. Do you really own zat tune?") rather than for the copyright holders to prove the music is stolen. This poses a problem for people who did in fact legally purchase music CDs in years past and transferred them to their computers when it was perfectly legal to do so and before DRM was in place. These audiophiles probably cannot prove they legally own the music. Who keeps a receipt for a personal music purchase?