Digital Rights Management, which is designed to prevent unauthorized copying of audio files and control the number and type of portable devices on which they can be played, has turned out to be one of the most hotly contested technologies of the decade.  While it's understandable that rights holders don't want to see a recurrence of the original Napster disaster, which saw billions of songs being illegally traded on the Net, the various implementations of DRM have proven to be a real pain for legitimate users who just want to be able to enjoy music they've legally acquired.  

The bulk of commercial music is still sold on compact discs, and there are plenty of digital audio extraction applications available which can make short work of transferring an entire disc to a hard drive in any number of unprotected formats.  Why, then, do the record labels spend huge amounts of money inserting convoluted, customer-alienating DRM schemes into their digital downloads, when those downloads account for a small fraction of total sales?

Perhaps some label execs are finally waking up and asking themselves that question.  The world's largest label, Universal, is now following in the footsteps of EMI and making non-DRM versions of its songs available online, and they're going one better than EMI:  the unprotected tracks will not carry a price premium.

Universal will not be making the unprotected music available on Apple's market-leading iTunes Music Store, however; they want to use iTunes as a control group.  Non-DRM tracks will be sold via Amazon, Google, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, RealNetworks' Rhapsody, Puretracks and several others, and in January, Universal will review the situation and will then determine whether or not the experiment will continue.

If those unprotected tracks end up all over illegal P2P networks, it's a safe bet that Universal will pull the plug.  If not, it could signal the end of that pesky DRM once and for all.  Stay tuned.

Read more about this at USA Today.