Some sanity in our DRM'ed world

Today Wired News ran an article titled Reasons to Love Open Source DRM. This article represents the first ray of hope in the land of Mordor... or rather Digital Rights Management. To summarize, Sun Microsystems is working on a new DRM system called DReaM that would have two major advantages over standard systems (from a user point of view):

1. The rights would be associated with an individual person, not a particular device.
2. The device licenses would be distributed by an independent standards body, and the software code itself would be opensource.

The very fact that this proposal is coming from a big open-source advocate rather than a hardware music player company is good news. It just makes sense that if I buy a song, I should be able to play it when I visit a friend or when I drive in a rented car. I just hope that Apple/Microsoft don't find a way to shut the project down. This will certainly shake things up in the digital world.