Depends on the license.

Comes With Music is rather a service. It allows you to listen to unlimited music for a specific period of time.

Does it? I thought if you broke your device, you lost all your music. I'm happy to be corrected if that's not the case.

This caused quite an uproar at the time. Google eventually relented and offered a proper refund. But everyone still lost the videos they'd purchased in Google's "download-to-own" program.

"On December 4, 2007, Nokia unveiled their plans for the "Nokia Comes With Music" initiative, a program that would partner with Universal Music Group International,Sony BMG, Warner Music Group, and EMI as well as hundreds of Independent labels and music aggregators to bundle 12, 18, or 24 months worth of unlimited free music downloads with the purchase of a Nokia Comes With Music edition phone. Following the termination of the year of free downloads, tracks can be kept without having to renew the subscription. Downloads will be both PC and mobile-based." 1

So it looks like it can be kept on the PC or device itself. Though frankly I rather not pay the fee at all and not get the Comes With Music.

Well the difference is that you never 'owned' a license for the downloaded content. Instead you have a contract to download for free unlimited music for X months. I don't know how exactly the synchronization stuff works, but my point is that its different from the examples given where licenses to listen to DRMed music were sold which then was copied to harddrive. I even find broadcasted DRM content like football or Olympics different from the examples too.

I wonder if it will turn up so, that there will at least a small anti-DRM movement. People will crete apps that will not work if DRM is activated, just opposite to those apps which will not work if DRM is not on..

I don't think there is a full VM/emulator for maemo either. Or are you saying you got useful work apart from compilation done on ARM qemu? ;-)

IIUC the sdk vm images they are shipping are just ubuntu images with scratchbox.

You could theoretically create a hacked kernel image that "looked like" the "secure" one for the applications, bypassing the Fritz chip completely, but I don't see the point. It's probably easier for the consumer just to skip the services that require DRM and stay in the "Open" mode.

My concern with this sort of move is that some developers who would be prepared to deal with a DRM-free platform if that's all that was on offer, will instead choose to make apps DRM only if it seems like an easy choice. If that happens we'll get the split that Android has between the 'developer' and normal phones and there'll be an overall chilling effect on the Maemo ecosystem. Plus, people will inevitably try to break the DRM system which will put Nokia in direct opposition to a large chunk of their (potential) developers.

All this to support a model the music industry's already moving away from - it doesn't seem worth it.

in the end its all about a bunch of large incumbents seeing their reason to exist go up in smoke...

funny that corps can pull the rug under their workers with the excuse of efficiency, but pull the rug under the corps and there is "holy" wrath to be had...

Well, if they do the DRM right, it works the opposite way. The binary is encrypted and will not run without it being decrypted by the chip and maybe some more. The whole chain to start the process is also verified with checksums etc., so one should not be able (easily) to dump the unencrypted version from the memory. The same way the whole audio chain is locked when an DRM'd music is played.

Depends, if the price is right and I'll be able to get my data out of the software when I want so I could move it somewhere else (no lock-in), I would consider buying DRM'd stuff. Furthermore, I understand what the money lost by widespread "free copy" means for a small business doing quality work. Not always, but often, the open source stuff just is missing the last mile to be that tangible "quality". That is what the businesses should and have to do if they want to sell their stuff.

But.. DRM should not be forced, so that all commercial software would to be locked - most of it will be anyways cracked. I think better way to fight common piracy is the "release often" - people like to have the latest version with all the nice whistles and bells and they won't have it if they pirate stuff. Other thing what companies have been doing is to have value adding services online which are not available for pirates.

That is one of my fears too.. and what I'm more worried is obsolesce by software. The device would be obsolete not because of the hardware would not do the job but because of the software can not be updated to stay current.

Suppose that your device will be 2 years old and still working perfectly. The support has ended for your product as now there are new devices with ARM&LEG2000 chip which has some nice new and enhanced talents. The OSS has progressed in these years and you would like to upgrade it to make it faster and nicer, as you can do with any old PC with Ubuntu. You would also install some new commercial software, but your old libraries are not supported anymore. But if your update your kernel and base libraries, all DRM'd stuff you bough will stop working. Consequently, as your device is old and not supported the outside source software stack will never be supported. Now, if you think 2 years too short time for this to happen, then think 4, 6.. To give some though, this is already happening. My gf is using my old 770 while commuting and is perfectly happy OS2008HE setup I have rolled in, but I can see that the software is now bitrotting.. (Fortunately there is no DRM'd software, I have high hopes for Mer )