iRony

Boing Boing and Ernest Miller both note with some bemusement a squib up at Huffington Post by former RIAA honcho Hilary Rosen kvetching about the irritating Digital Rights Management baffles on the iPod. Now, I'm in full agreement: It's awfully annoying that I can't copy music I've dumped on the iPod back to my own machine without going through various time-wasting workarounds. But the golden line from Rosen is this:

If you are really a geek, you can figure out how to strip the songs you might have bought from another on-line store of all identifying information so that they will go into the iPod. But then you have also degraded the sound quality. How cruel.

You may also, of course, have technically subjected yourself to hefty penalties under the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. And the numero-uno booster of the DMCA when it was being debated? Well, I hate to name names, but it rhymes with Zillary Bosen. How cruel.