Linux DRM-free Ubuntu One Music Store in beta

David M Williams
Friday, 05 March 2010 11:48

Opinion and Analysis

Canonical is privately beta-testing its own music store, set to go live with the release of Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx, later next month. The music store will offer both DRM-free and watermark-free MP3s.

According to Canonical the Ubuntu One Music Store has partnered with 7digital Business Services to provide the digital media due to their extensive existing collection of music available without digital rights management (DRM).

DRM has long been a scourge of music lovers, and indeed anyone purchasing digital goods.

The basic stated intent is to provide copyright holders with a means of limiting distribution of their intellectual property. While this can be appreciated, DRM too frequently gets in the way of legitimate usage by making the assumption customers are pirates (despite having actually purchased the product in the first place).

The popular computer game Spore was slammed mercilessly in Amazon.Com reviews due to its use of DRM- technology. Originally, Electronic Arts intended Spore to require authentication every 10 days but faced with opposition chose instead to permit the game to only authenticate on up to three computers. This was later increased to five computers and ultimately the rootkit-like DRM mechanism was removed from subsequent releases.

On a personal level, I purchased my first, and only, e-Book from Amazon.Com in 2005. I paid almost the same price for 'Leading Geeks' as a PDF download that I would have for the hardcover book. After downloading I was frustrated by only being able to read the book on specific, registered, computers and only being able to print a small number of pages.

Eventually, with the release of the Kindle Amazon decided to retire its previous e-Book methods and that digital download is now lost forever. I can never re-download it from Amazon and I can't activate it on any other computers. Thanks to the wonder of DRM, I have nothing to show for my purchase whatsoever.

Consider the pain, then, of music lovers who choose to purchase their latest hits from an online store to then find that (for example) the music is a protected Windows Media Audio (WMA) file and cannot be converted into MP3 format for use on portable MP3 players.

Read on to hear what Ubuntu is doing about it.