Just when I thought that the topic that I blogged about was obsolete, I stumbled along the piece of news that Apple has inserted a DRM chip into its new iPod Shuffle, – thus effectively stopped any user who wants to use his / her own preferred brand of earphones. At first, I was skeptical, as I know that Apple is a successful brand and certainly has its own band of haters who are ready to say anything to taint its reputation.

But today, Techcrunch has posted an article where someone actually has dissected the said model of iPod and found an unidentified chip, “that appears to be some sort of proprietary digital control that prevents unauthorized transmission of commands to the Shuffle without an official Apple adapter.” Now, this may well be the evidence that we need that the Shuffle does indeed contain a DRM chip.

Which is just very sad and hypocritical. Sad, because the DRM technology which was first invented to stop any piracy to intellectual properties, is now being used to defer what is actually a fair business competition. Hypocritical, because Apple’s own Steve Jobs has been reported before to state his position that he is ( or should we say was? ) anti-DRM. Granted, Jobs is not currently on the helm of Apple due to health issues, but as David Rothman of Teleread excellently put it, “the Shuffle was probably planned long before the back-off, and second, I doubt that his people would take this radical step without consulting with him.” People may actually leave iPod as their own preferred brand of MP3 player after this.

As for me, I now find myself simply lamenting the day DRM was invented. Period. The way things are going, if big companies keep on using it, the only one being victimized is us : the valid customer. As for the piracy, I do feel that you can now conveniently use it as an excuse if you want to use DRM in your product to force people to use its own peripherals ( another of your products ). The customer is then left with no choice. Let’s just pray that somebody, somewhere will again do something about this. At the very least, we can say our opinion about this abuse of our technology.