Last week I blogged about the brouhaha over Steve Jobs' comments on DRM; now copyfightin' Cory Doctorow, (late of the EFF, visiting professor at USC) weighs in via a Salon essay, with his usual vigor and style:

While it's true that most of us haven't loaded our 10,000-song iPods with $9,900 worth of iTunes songs, it doesn't follow that the switching cost for even casual iTunes customers is negligible. If you'd bought just one iTunes track every month since the launch in 2003, you'd have rung up $82 in lock-in music. Throw in a couple of $9.99 albums and maybe an audiobook or two and you can easily find yourself in $150 down the lock-in hole.

That's $150 you kiss goodbye if you buy a sexy little Creative Labs Zen or a weird little no-name from the wildly imaginative entrepreneurs of Malaysia. Not only won't your iTunes Store music play on those devices, it's illegal to try to get it to play on those devices. — Via Salon

The one spot where Cory seems to be skating a bit close to open water is his assertion that "Once you put music on your iPod, you can't get it off again without Apple's software." That is so close to true that it's hard to argue with, but my inner nerd has to point out that it is theoretically possible to mount an iPod under Linux (google "ipod mount drive linux"). As a practical matter, savvy iPod users also use third-party apps to move music off iPods, though I wouldn't know a thing about that, since it is apparently against the law, as would be using a tool like Jack to route the copy-protected AAC output of an iTunes track into a DRM-free mp3. Like Cory sez, DRM is a mug's game.

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Update: A reader suggested the freeware Floola for iPod management, and it rocks. Intuitive GUI file operations, and it runs on Mac, Win, and linux. (Thanks, Andrew K, via Jhodi!)