News

The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) maintains a website that we have found invaluable for keeping up with news about technological restrictions to information and fair use. Last week, we were directed to the EFF's new User's Guide to DRM in Online Music, which we recommend to everyone still undecided about buying into one of the online providers.

We have our own reservations about download services—as audiophiles, we are, of course, concerned about the lossy compression schemes that dominate the mainstream providers. Yet, we reckon that most consumers know they are sacrificing bandwidth for ease of storage and shorter download times—and we assume that most folks who share our concerns still choose concrete media such as CDs, SACDs, and DVD-As. However, many music lovers we have spoken to have been completely unaware of the different copy-protection systems employed by the download services, a situation exacerbated by the fact that no two have the same restrictions (not to mention that, as far as we can determine, no two are compatible).

That's why we salute the EFF for making this information available in such a simple format. We learned a lot and suspect you will, too.

We just returned from a trip that took us to an estate sale early one morning where the most frenzied action took place in the room containing 4000 LPs and several hundred CDs. But when we say "frenzied," we don't mean pitched battle—what impressed us most was the way that the collectors pointed out choice items to one another (not rarities, mind you, just good stuff). We'd miss this level of sharing and camaraderie in a world where we were denied resale rights to the music we purchased, so we found the EFF scorecard's revelations on that point alone extremely sobering.