The Battle Over Music Piracy

Viewpoint: Record labels don't trust us with their music. But they need to retune that thinking, says Lev Grossman

Illustration for TIME by Dan Page

Learning to love your inner pirate.

When Amazon.com announced its plan to open a digital music store to sell MP3s, you had to really work to get excited about it. It's hard to think of a press release that would be less surprising. At this rate, my 3-year-old daughter will be opening a digital music store pretty soon. And Amazon's selling MP3s? It's a digital music store. What else would it sell?

But Amazon's move was actually a strategic salvo in the great secret war of the $60 billion music industry, the fight over Digital Rights Management, usually known by the spine-tinglingly thrilling abbreviation DRM. What's DRM?...

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