Kelvyn Taylor expressed concern (PCW November 2007, Editorial) about the possibility that music protected by digital rights management (DRM) systems may become unavailable to a legitimate purchaser because of the failure of the supplier or some other similar event.

I share his view that DRM is, as a principle, fine, but that the DRM mechanism used should not be intrusive.

Better still, it should offer advantages to purchasers. To date, just about every attempt at DRM appears to create problems for users at one level or another.

But I wonder whether DRM is a fair focus of his concern. All media has a finite life, usually as a consequence of the carrier media. Nowadays we buy a copy of a tune on a CD, or a film on DVD, but at some point the disc will break down or the equipment to play the disc will fail and replacements will have become obsolete.

But this is nothing new; when I was younger I was puzzled by the older members of the family who were sad that they could no longer play the boxes of 78s that now resided in their lofts. A few years on and I have similar boxes of LPs and 7in vinyl records sitting gathering dust.

Maybe one day in the future we will only be playing high definition DVDs and my current collection of standard DVDs will join the vinyl.

If we buy something on one format, we don’t automatically assume that we can obtain a copy of the same material on a different format. It might be a nice idea to be able to buy a copy of a film that we originally purchased on Laserdisc on DVD, or to replace DVDs with high definition DVDs, at the cost of the media, but sadly the companies that own the rights don’t agree. So if a DRM system renders some media unplayable it seems little different to the situation where a player fails and a replacement is no longer available.

Of course, if a DRM system enabled us to purchase the rights to view or listen to media on whatever device is convenient, or whatever format happens to be available to us at the time, that really would be an advantage.

And I would be at the front of the queue to buy my media, safe in the knowledge that it would be likely to outlast the technology that I am using today.

Gary Beaton