Congress Investigates National DRM Standard

I was surprised to find out yesterday that Congress was holding hearings on whether or not they should mandate some national Digital Rights Management system. Evidently there is some hand wringing about the fact that you can't buy music from Real's online music service and play it on your iPod. Y'know, there is a format that lets you do that. It's called MP3, kids. But none of the major music services use MP3 out of fear of massive retaliation from the music industry. It's also funny since if they hadn't passed the DMCA, I don't think Apple would really have a leg to stand on when they accuse Real of illegally reverse engineering their DRM, since subverting copy protection wasn't such a huge deal until they passed that piece of crap legislation (also at the behest of people like the RIAA). [article]