I'm a realist about Digital Rights Management. I'm neither a knee-jerk DRM hater nor a DRM zealot. I've worked with enough content companies to understand DRM's importance. What I don't like, however, is a bad implementation of DRM. Here's what I mean. On Friday, I recorded what I thought was my finest podcast ever (yes, a pretty low bar, but still....). Friday's podcast was a review of all of the Grammy-nominated songs in one of the country categories. I even got the file size down to svelte 45 megabytes. I put it on my iRiver 180 to see how it sounded, and it was terrific. So far, so good. I then decided to see if I could slim the file size down even further. That's when I made my mistake.

I didn't think I needed to back up the original recording because I had a copy on my iRiver. Makes sense, right? So I resampled the original and saved it in its new 34 megabyte size. The sound quality was mediocre, with a fair number of crackling artifacts from the compression. No problem. I still had the original on the iRiver. Big Mistake. That's when I learned that I can move files from computer > iRiver but not back from iRiver > computer. This makes no sense. But I suppose it does put a stop to all of those kids trading iRivers for a night and copying each other's music. Was that ever a problem? And isn't breaking the device for the honest user a bigger problem? Grrrrr.

I won't be so careless on Monday.