This is tangentially related to something I wrote in my post on Bill C-61: Do we ever really own our digital media?  In this case, it’s not even about the right to share the music we have with other people — it’s about being able to use it at all.  Farhad Manjoo of The Machinist writes about Microsoft’s announcement (and then the reversal of that announcement) that they were planning to take their servers offline, which would lock all DRMed media and make it useless.

The solution Microsoft suggested?  Back your mp3s up on CD, and, presumably, rip them again.  This provokes two emotions in me: on the one hand, I’m peeved that Microsoft’s only solution to a problem of their own divising will result in a huge time-consuming headache for users forced into backing up, not to mention poorer sound quality.  But it’s also a bit stunning because Microsoft has essentially just encouraged people to, uh, crack their DRM, and told them exactly how to do it (as if they didn’t already know).

So, the moral of the story is threefold: 1, if you purchase DRMed media, be prepared to get screwed someday; 2, DRM is useless, because it’s so easy to crack that Microsoft actually suggests it as a form of subverting their own flawed system; and 3, there really is no justification for DRM anymore.  Between its uselessness and its annoyingness, it has become a joke, and not an hilarious inside joke like the ROFLcopter — it’s a colossal joke on an industry-wide scale.