I’ve never been a huge opponent of DRM. It seems natural that copyright owners would seek to protect their property in some way and the draw backs, such as increased power consumption by devices playing protected files, seemed minimal. But today defective by design hit home.

I’ve already blogged about loving Larry Brown but I haven’t been able to find On Fire , his memoir about being a firefighter. That was until I found a downloadable audio version of it at the local library. After a bit of internet trouble, I was able to login to netLibrary, the service that provides the audiobooks to libraries. I downloaded a 66 MB .wma file that purported to be unabridged. It seemed like a small file but I will never know if it’s the whole book since the goddamned thing won’t work on my Macintosh.

It seems that since netLibrary is lending books, they chose the Windows Media format for its digital rights management. NetLibrary files expire after 21 days but, because they are crippled .wmas instead of shiny, happy .mp3s they won’t work on a Mac or an iPod. I’m pretty pissed since this was my chance to “read” this book without ordering it off of Amazon. And also because my library has the novelization of the Fantastic Four movie but no books by Michael Chabon.

Her’s another assessment of the situation