Apple is on to something when it suggests that we axe copy protection

As someone who has spent years in the company of those who fight for digital rights - our civil rights in the digital age - I find the phrase "digital-rights management" gives me the creeps. Of course, the rights in digital-rights management apply only to a content-owner's right to stop you distributing his song/film/book across a peer-to-peer file-sharing system, rather than my right, say, to privacy in the database state. But that doesn't stop digital-rights management sounding, to my ears at least, a bit like "human-rights management". In other words, it's a bit doublespeak.

Last week, we learned about the DRM code buried deep in Microsoft Vista. But it is important to understand that Microsoft is not the only company dealing in DRM. Despite the grinning innocence of smart-casual Robert Webb in Apple's latest advertising campaign (I've always preferred the thoughtful, if suit-clad, David Mitchell myself), the success of Apple's iTunes Store is built on DRM's supposedly firm foundations. And that is starting to get Apple in a bit of bother.

Many people fill up their iPods with tracks ripped from their CD collection. Still, in 2006, two billion songs were purchased from the iTunes Store. Each one of these songs is encoded with Apple's "Fairplay" DRM code and can only be played on iPods. Which means that, if a significant part of your digital music collection comes from iTunes, you are locked in to buying iPods for the rest of your life. You can't even "format shift"- like you did from vinyl to CD or CD to MP3 - when a new type of player comes along. Only Apple knows the Fairplay code, and it is against the law for you to break it.

That doesn't stop some people. The nature of DRM code is such that it contains all the information the average hacker needs to break it. This has given rise to Playfair, a programme that illegally strips iTunes tunes of their DRM. Although Apple can fix Fairplay each time Playfair breaks it, the hackers maintaining Playfair always find a new way to crack Apple's code.

The iPod/DRM issue is what is known to techies as an interoperability problem. To Brussels, it's "anti-competitive". Europe is currently putting a lot of pressure on Apple to share its Fairplay code with competitors. But Apple argues that sharing the code with competitors will make it even easier for hackers to render it useless, and even harder for Apple to patch it.

In a statement on 6 February entitled "Thoughts on Music", Steve Jobs presented a brave alternative solution: do away with DRM altogether. That way, consumers can download a tune from wherever they want, and listen to it on whatever they want. This will not be music to the record industry's ears. But if we could find a way to give the money Apple wastes in its cat-and-mouse game with DRM hackers to artists instead, we would all be far better off.

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