There is an increasing variety of options for purchasing music online, but also a growing thicket of confusing usage restrictions. You may be getting much less than the services promise. Many digital music services employ digital rights management (DRM), prevents you from doing things like using the portable player of your choice or creating remixes.

Understanding how DRM and the DMCA pose a danger to your rights will help you to make fully informed purchasing decisions. Before buying DRM pro music from any service, you should consider the following examples and be sure to understand how the service might limit your ability to make lawful use of the music you purchase.

Apple reserves the right to change at any time what you can do with the music you purchase at the iTunes Music Store. Another hallmark of ownership is the right to give away or sell your property. That's called "first sale," and it's explicitly protected under copyright law.As the table below shows, there are many other ways that Apple's DRM limits what you can do with a song you "own."

• Restricts back-up copies: Song can only be copied to 5 computers
• Allowed only 7 times to burn the same playlist
• Limits portable player compatibility: iPod and other Apple devices only
• No remixing: Cannot edit, excerpt, or otherwise sample songs

Many other download services choose to impose similar restrictions.

Tired of DRM-protected file formats like WMA, M4P, AA, M4B, MP4 getting in your way?

Share DRM Music enables you to share your audio files wherever you want to. Share DRM Music helps you virtually burns any music files to a virtual CD-RW drive named Share DRM Music, then the target music format file will be generated automatically. And the audible quality will not be lost.