Music industry digital foolishness

I was surprised at the response, both in comments and verbally, to a post I had on stealing music some while back (here). I still hold the view that copying the music against the license is stealing it, however foolish the license.  It also allows the music industry to perpetuate the existing model, even if piracy is rife, since no competitor can easily exist.  However, it is entertaining to find out more of the foolishness of the music indutry over many years, as well as the corporate excess, so the long and entertaining post here makes great reading (£20k/year candle bill anyone?).

A related entertaining post dealt with how sports organisations make the same stupid mistakes. For example, see this story about removal of the DRM server that supported downloaded baseball matches. It sound utterly inept on the part of the seller, and a classic example of why DRM gets a bad press. This used to happen with evolution of storage formats of course – reel to reel, VHS (now going the way of Betamax), cassettes and the like are hard to play. But, the technology didn’t disappear overnight – you have time to do something.