The RIAA has been stated to say over the weekend to officially say, at least in terms of commercial music, that digital rights management is dead. 

I guess that it’s good that they’ve realized this, but I also think that it’s atrocious that it took this long for them to realize it. I mean, after the Sony/BMG rootkit debacle and the countless horrid jukebox players that would embed themselves on a legitimate purchaser’s PC with no safe way to remove them? you would think that they would have, by process of elimination, figured out that DRM has never stopped anyone from bootlegging any kind of music and has only made it difficult for the people who paid to enjoy the music they’ve invested in.

So, my obvious reaction is be “good riddance to bad rubbish.” Developing a new business model means you actually have to build a new one, not just hamhandedly enforce your existing one and calling it a new business model.