EFF On DRM Guidelines

There is an increasing variety of options for purchasing music online, but also a growing thicket of confusing usage restrictions. You may be getting much less than the services promise.Many digital music services employ digital rights management (DRM) - also known as "copy protection" - that prevents users from doing things like using the portable player of your choice or creating remixes. Forget about breaking the DRM to make traditional uses like CD burning and so forth. Breaking the DRM or distributing the tools to break DRM may expose you to liability under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) even if you're not making any illegal uses. In this world of "authorized music services," law-abiding music fans often get less for their money than they did in the old world of CDs (or at least, the world before record companies started crippling CDs with DRM, too). Unfortunately, in an effort to attract customers, these music services try to obscure the restrictions they impose on you with clever marketing.
This guide "translates" the marketing messages by the major services, giving you the real deal rather than spin. In my view,I think DRM will begin to face intense challenges in the emerging future. When private P2P networks are becoming to be more felt and with BitTorrents, XDCC in IRC etc..