Wes can certainly speak well enough for himself, but I believe he was referring to watermarking, lawsuits, threats of lawsuits, and other self-serving practices by industry moguls designed to cow consumers into toeing THEIR line. I agree with him. I will not be bully-ragged into buying anything on any seller's terms. I am the consumer and the final judge on what parts me from my cash. If you want my business, you had damn well better make it easy for me to get to the product. I can just walk and spend my money in somebody else's candy store.

And let's not forget Sony who last year deliberately added a virus to certain cds to prevent users from copying them.

Funny how US citizens emerged into the new millenium: DMCA, watermarking, mandatory copy-protection chips embedded into their DVDs, etc. (not to mention recent legal developments allowing the administration to literally pull out nails without due process and call it "manicure").
We used to call the US "The Land of Freedom". What a (sad) joke!

As many of the regulars here already know DRM is a subject oh so near and dear to my heart and while I wasn't confused by Mr. Phillips' article I do think that Wes may be a little guilty of over simplifying things for the sake of saving some space or words.

Here's the point that I believe Wes was trying to get across.

While many of us don't find using our computer to rip the music on a CD into an MP3 file all that difficult or troublesome, there are still many cunsumers for whom this process is either difficult or damn near impossible. And then there are all those consumers who foolishly choose to buy their music on-line in a form which should be useable in their digital music players but may not be due to DRM issues. These are the "cranky" consumers that Wes may have been referring to.

And if the CD is dead, or at least on its way out, and with its demise also comes the death of retail CD store (see the recent news stories on the closing of Tower Records) then what will be left to replace it? Based on the presently available choices one would think that the music business will be staking their future on the on-line music stores, such as iTunes and the like. Unless the problems with DRM, which have thus far plagued music purchased legally on-line, are resolved in the very near future there will be a whole lot more cranky music consumers out there for the music business to deal with.