Last week was CES and there were a number of amazing products. These carried the promise of "convergence" or the idea that the best of what was available in the consumer electronics world would merge with the best of what if available in the high tech world and birth an amazing new customer experience.

Following CES Apple had their own version of CES where some related products were announced and, leading up to this show as well; we looked forward to the advantages of 'convergence".

What we often got is the word "can't" applied to the things we really wanted to legally do. If we wanted to put our DVD into a storage device and manage them like we do our music files, well there are a number of illegal ways to do that but no real legal ways today. If we wanted to take music we purchased from iTunes and listen to it on the leading home player the Sonos we can't do that at all. If we wanted to take music we legally downloaded using a Microsoft "Plays for Sure" service and play it in every room in the house at the same time for a party, well we can't do that either even if we use all Microsoft offerings.

Clearly there are a number of increasingly illegal ways to do some of this stuff which points to the fact this isn't a technology problem. What it is a DRM problem and DRM stands for Damn Retched Media. Actually it really stands for Digital Rights Management but no matter how you look at it these three letters represent one of the strongest anti-consumer efforts that has ever existed.

DRM: Hell by Any Other Name

The concept behind DRM isn't really all that bad. It was designed to protect the rights of content owners from intellectual property pirates by keeping from doing illegal things like putting movies on the web. What seemed to have been forgotten was the goal was to hurt the thieves not the legitimate customers but it is clear the exact opposite is true. Piracy, by most measures, is vastly more wide spread then it was before DRM was introduced in fact, by my read, it appears that all DRM did was increase the profitability of some pirates by making their goods more valuable.

In secondary efforts the media organizations have gone after children for sharing music files with friends and in one high profile case are going after a working mother as a result of some child, according to her not her own, gaining access to her laptop while she wasn't in the room. Somehow an organization of thugs chasing after mothers and children wouldn't seem to be the image that I would want associated with my chosen career but that is increasingly happened with the media companies because DRM simply isn't working as intended.

The worst event, and it happened towards the end of the year, was the introduction of a root kit onto Sony BMG disks. This rootkit opened legal customers up to a whole new class of viruses, violated their privacy, and caused their PCs to slow or crash. And Sony BMG did all of this to their legal customers not to Pirates who undoubtedly had access to disks without this dreaded rootkit. This rootkit was supposed to function as an enhanced form of DRM creating even greater restrictions, which it did, but these restrictions once again only seemed to apply to legal customers no those getting access to the music illegally.