Those who have criticized Microsoft in the past for being slow in fixing security flaws should take heart that a mere 24 hours after the FairUse4WM code break application was announced and the letter sent asking them not to fix it, Microsoft announced a patch for Media Player. It does seem a tad hypocritical for them to stop people ripping off music in the very product which has Rip as a menu action.

A Norwegian hacker called DVD-Jon has created code that beats Apple's copy protection, removing the playback restrictions of iPods. He's planning to license and sell this code via his Web site. I'm waiting for someone to develop hack code breaking his copy protected iPod copy protection breaking code. They could call their hack iRony.

BigPond's Games Shop is releasing DRM-protected games with a 60-minute trial, then it's pay up or lose it. I agree. Even though I remember PC games 20 years ago also came with various copy protections, which lasted about a month before programs like CopyWrite and CopyMaster were updated to copy the diskettes. If history follows (and it usually does), a games DRM breaker program is likely to surface this side of New Year.

The Beatles song Yesterday comes to mind, as it was a lot simpler before downloads and copy protection. When I was young, digital theft meant the old five-finger discount. Now we have multiple competing DRM formats, each with different hardware requirements and restrictions. Yesterday is reportedly the song most covered by other artists, so if I wanted to download every Yesterday cover, I could be subjected to at least five different DRM schemes, from Microsoft, SanDisk, Real Networks, OMA and Apple.

We're seeing attempts to artificially curtail the technology to keep it within our current social and legal boundaries. The subscription model by SanDisk Rhapsody provides a pre-load of gigabytes of music with automatic updates over time, so as a consumer, you are spared the trouble of purchasing and downloading - or getting to select the music you'd like.

The subscription model has often been tried and usually fails. When commercial wireless first hit the country around 1920, it was sold as a set pre-tuned to one radio station to which you paid a subscription and got to listen to whatever they played. This sounds just like SanDisk of 90 years ago. If you wanted to hear a second station, you bought a second set and a second subscription. Sounds a lot like the current iPod versus MP3 restrictions, doesn't it?

Typically after internal protections fail, legal protections are next attempted. The US Supreme Court last year established liability for services that "induce" infringement, covering business like Grokster and potentially YouTube. I agree with this, even though this approach was previously attempted with blank video and audio cassettes. Content owners then argued - correctly - that the main use for blank cassettes was for copying material rarely owned by the user. That law, and the subsequent suggestion of a royalty tariff on all blank media, never came to pass.

US Congress is currently looking at an anti-circumvention law, to make the avoidance of one company's protection product by another company's anti-protection product illegal. Another view I agree with, even though attempting to solve a global issue with a single country's legislature historically has little chance of success.

The debate's not nearly over yet and having looked carefully at the Yes/Yes/No arguments, I certainly agree with them. I also agree that eventually, we'll regard this as a storm in a digital teacup and look back on it as a quaint time with a quirky technology for which we have no further use. Much like 5¼in diskettes, which I no longer have (in case anybody asks).

Bruce Kirkham is a veteran IT satirist and professional speaker ­specializing in leading edge technologies and scepticism, who views the IT industry not so much as "dot com" as "dot comedy"