Image that you bought an MP3 player a few years ago and excited by the new technology you started buying music from online stores. You know the music is copy protected, but it is ok, it is protected by PlaysForSure, a Microsoft standard and supported by several players.

Then Microsoft comes out with a new MP3 player. It is sleek and sexy, so you rush out and buy yourself a new toy! You get it home, but discover that it doesn’t work with Windows Media Player. Oh well, you install the Zune software and go to import all of the music that you bought from Microsoft’s MSN Music store, but for some reason it doesn’t work. You head to the music store to find out what’s up, but find that it’s gone.

It takes you awhile to figure it out since PlaysForSure is only mentioned on the Zune site once, deep inside an executive bio, but your new player won’t play any of your music. Surely this can’t be true, it would be suicide for a company, but the nightmare is true. If you want to listen to your music on the Zune, you need to re-purchase all of it.

Next you search for a program to unlock the music you legally purchased, but find none. Unlocking locked music is illegal under the DMCA. You could always make CDs of all your locked songs and then re-rip them at a lower quality, but technically, even that is illegal. If you want to listen to the music you own on an unauthorized device, you are a criminal.

Digital Rights Management or DRM is something that very few people were concerned about or even knew about until recently, but as companies continue to tighten the screws, people are beginning to wake up and demand their rights be returned to them.

Don’t think you are safe just because you buy all of your music from the Apple Music Store, it is crippled in the exact same way. Try listening to your music on anything other than an iPod. Even many of the CDs you buy have copy protection and DVDs are usually region encoded, so don’t buy movies while you travel. They won’t work when you get home.

It is high time that consumers let these companies know that we won’t stand for this by refusing to buy. The RIAA blames piracy for falling music sales, it is about time that they learned that it is because of their own greed.