[raydanator]

I stumbled upon this article, and wondered what the word on the street is?

http://www.pcworld.com/article/16129...e_control.html

[Brad]

The answer is: there is no DRM.

This "theory" has already been debunked.

[chucker]

Is there a chip on the other side of the buttons? Yes. Does it do any sort of authentication, encrypted or otherwise? Nope. All it does is handle the controls. Without encryption, it's not a DRM in the DMCA sense. And without authentication, there isn't even future potential for a DRM.

http://www.macworld.com/article/1394...phonechip.html

[Luca]

I think the only issue is that the buttons (I'm assuming every aspect of them, including the chip used to control them) is a proprietary Apple thing which would require any company that wants to make iPod Shuffle-specific headphones to license the technology from Apple. It's no different from Firewire or the iPod dock connector, though. Calling it DRM is a stretch. The reason I think people are referring to it as DRM is because the end result is similar - in the end, Apple controls how you listen to your music because you have to buy headphones from them or an adapter that uses Apple-licensed technology in order to listen to the music on the Shuffle.

The real problem isn't that Apple is licensing the controls rather than simply giving away the design for free... it's that the Shuffle was designed without any alternate control scheme in mind, and furthermore, the one it has is mediocre because it forces the user to memorize how to do commands instead of it being self-explanatory. Apple can put DRM in their headphone controls all they want... if they had put buttons on the Shuffle itself, it wouldn't have mattered.