Speaking of the iTunes Music Store, how 'bout that "FairPlay" digital rights management stuff, huh? For what it's worth, FairPlay seems a lot more, well, fair than the DRM used in any other online music systems; you can play a purchased song on up to three Macs (many Windows-based services limit you to two systems), you can burn it to discs as often as you like (other services typically have a burning surcharge [oooh, that's gotta hurt] on top of the monthly subscription fee), and you can stick it on all twelve or thirteen of those iPods you might have sitting around (other services typically prevent you from putting the songs on a portable player at all). So, yeah, it bugs us that it has to be there at all, but we've pretty much made our peace with it.

There's just one little problem: the main reason we've made our peace with it is because FairPlay can be stripped completely out of an iTMS song by the cumbersome but effective act of burning the song to a CD-R and then re-importing it into iTunes. (We use this method to convert our music into unprotected MP3s; sure, we lose a little quality, but at least we can play our purchased music via our TiVo, while the FairPlay/AAC-friendly version of the Home Media Option is still in the works.) But MacBidouille (by way of MacRumors) appears to be murmuring about "stricter DRM" in the upcoming iTunes 5-- specifically, something to work around that workaround.

If the rumor is true, then iTunes 5 might include additional DRM technology from Verance which would smear a supposedly-inaudible "watermark" on any audio CDs burned by iTunes, signalling any Verance-aware software (like, say, iTunes) that it's not allowed to re-encode any music on that disc. Meaning, you can still burn as many discs as you like, but those discs are protected in the sense that you can't get the music back off of them. Well, at least not in iTunes; MacRumors makes a good point, which is that any non-Verance-aware encoding software should be able to rip tracks from the CD just fine. Which means that there'll be a workaround to the workaround of the workaround.

And this is the way that DRM always seems to move: it becomes more and more annoying to honest people trying to use their songs/ebooks/whatever in legal ways, whereas dishonest people will always find a way to steal what they want no matter how much protection is slathered on top. But hey, that's what makes it so much fun! Assuming this all shakes out as rumored, we eagerly await Apple's workaround to the workaround to the workaround of the workaround.