Ordinary Gweilo

The SCMP had a story (War on piracy recruits 200,000 youthful spies – registration required) on Tuesday about children being encouraged to report illegal download sites.  Which is all very well, but where are the legal alternatives? 

If you have a phone or PDA with a built-in MP3 player is there any legal way to acquire music?  Even copying music from a CD you have purchased is not legal, so what are you supposed to do? 

Yes, there is EOLAsia, but they only offer music in WMA format – and with Digital Right Management to make it even less useful. 

I do have an MP3 player that does have all the DRM nonsense, and the only thing I’ve tried to download was the Ricky Gervais podcast.  I had numerous problems with the Audible software that is supposed to download the podcasts and transfer them to the MP3 player, and eventually it told me that I had to contact Audible because I had "exceeded the allowed number of devices" (whatever that means).  Needless to say, I only have one device, and as Audible don’t answer their emails I don’t have a solution.

Well, I do – I can download it to iTunes, burn a CD and then convert that to MP3, and copy it to the MP3 player.  Which means I have wasted my time and defeated their attempt to protect the content.  Ridiculous…