Are you ready for music that expires?

Have you ever recorded music from radio or copied cassettes and CDs? Then you may be in for a hard time ahead. Music companies have recently pulled more tricks from their sleeves in their battle against music piracy, writes Manninder Sekhon.

Up till now, when you buy a music CD, you actually own the CD and can play it on whatever CD player you like. You can make copies of the CD for your own use, and can even copy it to tape or other media so that you are not limited to using the music on just a CD player. But the music industry is going the way of the software business: copy protection for music. I'm not kidding you!

If you read the license agreements that come with your software, you'll see that if the software company doesn't like how you're using their product, then they can take it away from you and force you to remove it from your computer. You get no compensation if they take the software away, in spite of the fact that you paid for the software.

Software companies can do this because you don't actually buy their software. Instead of buying the software, you license it from the company. The term license is adequately confusing so that people don't even think about what it means. What it does mean is that you're actually using the software on a long term, open-ended lease. The software company can, at any time, decide that your lease has expired and legally require you to cease and desist from using the software you paid for.

Well, it looks like the recording industry is taking a page out of that same book. They are planning to increasingly restrict your music use, and essentially want you to lease it and collect rent in perpetuity. You fail to keep up your payments, they make your music collection go up in vapor. A good example of where this is going are some new CD's that are copy protected: you cannot rip them or transfer them to an MP3 player.

Another new scheme is being hatched by RealNetworks. For .95 a month you can download 100 songs, but you cannot burn them on a CD, copy or move them to another PC. And they expire after a month. If you find one you like, that one gets deducted from next month's number. So after a while you pay 10 bucks per month for 100 songs.... forever. So, are you ready for music that expires?

What do you think of music licensing? Do you think leasing music (like software) is the way to go, or do you think that after you pay for something you should own it? Are you taking any measures to make sure that if your music or software license is revoked that you can still access your stuff? Let us know if you have thoughts on these issues or any others!