As a fledgling best site ever, The Consumerist has had to do a fair amount of soul searching with regard to Digital Rights Management. It’s clearly a consumer issue—companies restricting your rights to use a product is our bread and butter—but it’s also sort of boring. We’ve decided to err on the side of pedantry. If the big media companies are still penalizing legitimate consumers, we’ll keep pointing out whose products you should avoid.

And when The New York Times starts pointing out that Sony’s ‘rootkit’ DRM programs are causing undue amounts of hassle for not only customers, but artists, we figure we’re on the right track. (Which is counter to the standard Gawker template, we know, but having felt a personal responsibility for killing the Circuits section in a previous editorial life, we’re feel a bit generous today.)

“Look, what we do is write music; we make music,” said Donnie Van Zant, who like most artists had no had no idea what sort of security features, if any, his label would place on the album. “I really don’t even know what D.R.M. means, to be honest with you.”

The Ghost in the CD [NYTimes]

Bonus Link: Bush Administration to Sony: It’s your intellectual property — it’s not your computer. [MP3Wire] The author twisted this a bit toward the dramatic, but the gist remains: Are the Feds feeling a need to act against aggresive DRM?

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