10 Technology 'Advances' That Actually Made Life More Annoying

3. DRM - Digital Rights Management

Digital Rights Management or DRM for short was one of the most annoying things to happen to digital media, but especially to digital music. When iTunes introduced DRM on their downloadable tracks, it prevented you from using that song on any device other than the computer it was downloaded on, or a twinned Apple device. However not everyone owned an iPod and were unable to transfer the song they had bought onto their MP3 player to take away with them. This caused much controversy as it blocked consumers from using any other device but an iPod, forcing everyone who wanted to take their purchased music with them into Apple's arms. This put other companies' products in jeopardy as it prevented them from being used with the DRM downloaded music. Thankfully though in 2009 DRM was removed from iTunes allowing their music to be copied to any device you owned, so you could take your music anywhere on anything. DRM does still exist, but thankfully not on digital music from the main vendors such as Amazon and iTunes. It was meant to stop copyright infringement, but instead this advance in protection ended up being more a headache for the millions of iTunes users with non Apple MP3 players.