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Digital Culture Media

The ultimate failure of DRM

Here’s a fabulous exercise in why DRM is an absolutely ludicrous answer to tech media issues. This guy found a way to strip the DRM from Napster files, and save the resultant WAV’s to CD. The result:

14 day trial = 336 hours = 20,160 minutes of potential music = 252 80 minute CDs

And that’s free music, kiddies.

I’m sorry, but….BWHAHAhahahahaha. I can’t help it. The RIAA/MPAA hijinks are laughable at this point. I said years ago that they are going to get a new model, or they will die. “Rentable” music was a stupid option…wrong model.

By griffey

Jason Griffey was most recently the Director of Strategic Initiatives at NISO, where he worked to identify new areas of the information ecosystem where standards expertise was useful and needed. Prior to joining NISO in 2019, Jason ran his own technology consulting company for libraries, has been both an Affiliate at metaLAB and a Fellow and Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and was an academic librarian in roles ranging from reference and instruction to Head of Library IT and a tenured professor at the University of TN at Chattanooga.

Jason has written extensively on technology and libraries, including multiple books and a series of full-periodical issues on technology topics, most recently a chapter in Library 2035 - Imagining the Next Generation of Libraries by Rowman & Littlefield. His latest full-length work Standards - Essential Knowledge, co-authored with Jeffery Pomerantz, was published by MIT Press in March 2025.

He has spoken internationally on topics such as artificial intelligence & machine learning, the future of technology and libraries, decentralization and the Blockchain, privacy, copyright, and intellectual property. A full list of his publications and presentations can be found on his CV.
He is one of eight winners of the Knight Foundation News Challenge for Libraries for the Measure the Future project (http://measurethefuture.net), an open hardware project designed to provide actionable use metrics for library spaces. He is also the creator and director of The LibraryBox Project (http://librarybox.us), an open source portable digital file distribution system.

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