Jamba tears tech restrictions off EMI mobile music

Another little nugget out of MWC that’s got the potential to cause big waves: mobile entertainment company Jamba has announced its going to release music from EMI without any digital rights management (DRM) technology – that’s all the annoying technical restrictions that govern which devices you can transfer your purchased music to and how many times you can burn it to physical media.

Anyone shopping for music tracks on Jamba will get two versions of the tracks they buy, one MP3 file sent to their PC and another compressed AAC+ to their mobile.

The usual excuse for including DRM on purchased music, or any other content for that matter, is to prevent piracy by stopping people giving them songs to their friends or selling them. That may be part of it, but cassettes and CDs never had DRM to prevent such piracy and the music industry still flourished. To the consumer, DRM is typically viewed as an annoyance and a hinderance when moving music between mobile, PC or MP3 player, rather than a sensible anti-piracy move. It’s good to see Jamba getting rid of it.