I don’t care if it’s music or software or videos, locking access to the product only hurts the customer.  People that are going to steal your intellectual property are going to find a way to steal it regardless of how you try and protect it.

I was having some hardware problems the other day and after a while of fighting with the problem I decided it would be easier to bring my laptop back to a factory install and go from there.  I was only half right.  The hardware problem went away but I introduced a number of problems all in someway related to some kind of digital rights management.

First it was my music.  My computer was no longer authorized by iTunes.  It’s the same computer as last week but because I reinstalled the OS Apple thinks I have a new computer, I wish!  So I now have three of my five available computers authorized even though there are only two computers involved.  In a house of four people, where everyone has at least one computer, five authorizations may not be enough.   It took over 6 hours to re-transfer music and audio-books that I already had on my iPod.  Apple, smarten up!  That’s not fair, it’s not Apple’s fault.  It’s the music industry that has it’s head in the sand.  By and large the music on my iPod is music I bought either on CD or from the iTunes store.  As a result I had “licensing” problem.  I can get around these problems by doing what almost everyone else does and download my music from the Internet.  Is that really what the rights owners want me to do?

Then came the software for my GPS.  The original disk I bought a few years ago has not faired well.  It is scratched to the point where my computer will not read the disk.  Sure I can download a version from the support site but it needs the original software installed before it can do an update.  I was able find a work around but that only solved part of my problem.  I still don’t have my map files installed.  I can’t get replacement media from Garmin so I guess I’ll have to go with an opensource solution for the maps.

I even had problems with my Adobe Acrobat software.  I’ve been using Acrobat 7 pro for a few years.  It works fine.  It turns out that Adobe no longer supports Acrobat 7, they are on to version 9 now.  As a result I can no longer download version 7 from the Adobe website.  Luckily I was able to find a version on my machine but it wouldn’t work on Vista.  There is apparently a known compatibility issue.  I got tired of fighting with that and upgraded to version 9.  Maybe that was part of their strategy?

I just can’t help thinking that the only people that are affected by all these hoops or the people that are trying to abide by the rules.  My experiences over the last couple of days are really making question why I should.