Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, makes a case for digital music free from digital rights management (DRM), which restricts the use of music purchased from online music stores (like Apple's own iTunes store). But he says Apple is locked into using DRM because of the big music companies (namely, the "big four": Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI) insistence on it.

Jobs insists DRM does very little to prevent music piracy, in particular because "No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player. ... In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves."

Good point.