Schwarz
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The crux of the debate is this: When you buy a song, an album, or a movie, are you buying the content only in the form it comes in? If you purchase a song from Apple's iTunes store, should you be able to play it on any hardware you want? Not according to Apple, which bundles each download with a "digital rights management" scheme called FairPlay. When you pay 99 cents for the latest Sheryl Crow hit, it's stored on your hard drive as an encrypted file. Every time you play it on your computer with iTunes or on your iPod, it is unlocked with a random encryption key supplied by Apple. FairPlay allows you to load a song on up to five computers and an unlimited number of iPods and burn as many CDs as you please. But you can't e-mail a song to a friend, you can't distribute it over the Web, and you can't play it on anything but iTunes or an iPod.