All I want for Christmas is a legal music service

I might not have been the nicest boy this year, but I´m 99% sure Santa with deliver a brand new 40GB iPOD under the pine tree come Christmas morning.  It took me a long time to decide what digital music player to ask Santa for because I couldn´t decide which player would be the best for me. With the plethora of options available on the market I spent a long time searching CNET and various other Web sites comparing specs and price points, asking friends about their experiences with various players and generally annoying teenage customer service people at the local department stores who clearly didn´t give a hoot about my situation.

Eventually I couldn´t go past the iPOD.  The friendly user interface, MP3 support, the quality of the product and the storage capacity of 40GB was hard to look past.

Specs aside, the biggest gamble I see asking Santa for an iPOD is putting faith in Apple Australia to produce a local iTunes music service, something that is still lacking despite the companies large penetration into the local market.

Online there are currently legal music downloads services from Telstra, Ninemsn and Destra who supply content to retailers such as Sanity, Triple J and others.  However, all download services currently only support Windows Media Audio (WMA) digital rights management, a format the iPOD does not support.  Apple own their own digital rights management technology but are yet to provide a local service for downloads or license the technology for others to use.

It is technically possible to circumvent the WMA files and convert them to MP3 format to play on Apple´s iPOD player but then you are also technically breaking copyright.

While a legal downloading service for iPOD´s might be a while away, few people might know that Australia does not have a "fair use" law that allows users to copy their own CD´s which they have (legally) purchased.  Copying a copyrighted CD to an iPOD is not legal under Australian copyright laws.  So what is it legal for you say?  Possibly singing your own tunes in the shower or if you are an up and coming musician, playing works not under copyright.  

The chances of being caught for copying your own CD´s to an iPOD, or buying WMA files and circumventing the DRM technology are remote, and so is getting caught for illegally downloading copyrighted songs from P2P or a Russian MP3 site (which claim to be legal).

While there are numerous ways to get free MP3´s on the Web or by "borrowing" music from friends to put on your iPOD, I don´t want to break the law.  I´m an avid supporter of the local music industry (except for those one trick ponies from Australian Idol, but I digress) and I want to support every piece of copyright music I own.  

It seems the industry are again too interested in putting out fires over copyright, competing against each other to be the de facto standard in digital music so they can lock customers into their technology (remember VHS vs Beta). With current Australian legislation, they make criminals out of legitimate customers and generally ignore any good practice by developing a usable and affordable download service.

Come Christmas morning I will be copying the CD´s I have legitimately bought and converting them to my iPOD.  Like thousands of other Australians I will become another digital music law breaker under current circumstances.