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Amazon to Sell Music Sans Copy Protection

by Tim Stevens on May 17, 2007 at 11:01 AM

Amazon.com LogoAmazon plans to take on Apple's iTunes by launching its own online music download store sometime later this year. The company is certainly not the first to try and won't be the last, but what makes this move interesting is that Amazon is pledging to sell exclusively DRM-free tunes.

DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. It's the copy protection that most online music sellers (including Apple) apply to tunes to prevent you from giving them to friends or posting them online. In the end, DRM causes more headaches for consumers than it solves for the record labels (like not letting you play your iTunes-purchased music on anything other than an iPod). Recently, Apple's Steve Jobs pushed record labels to ditch DRM and let the music run free. EMI took the lead among major labels, selling its music DRM-free on Yahoo! Music and on iTunes, but few others have followed suit.

Amazon will have EMI's DRM-free music, too, but it will also include albums from 11,999 other record labels all without pesky DRM.

From BBC News

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Tags: Amazon, DRM, iTunes

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