Earlier this year, the last of the four major music labels offered its respective catalog for digital download to Amazon.com's music service in the MP3 format with no digital copy protections, giving users the ability to freely transfer songs to any portable MP3 music player.

Despite more than 20,000 lawsuits filed against music fans in the years since they started finding free tunes online rather than buying CDs from record companies, the recording industry has utterly failed to halt the decline of the record album or the rise of digital music sharing.

At this week's Digital Music Forum, lawyers managing digital rights for Microsoft's Zune music download site and RealNetworks' Rhapsody said that they too believe digital rights management to be more of a headache than an asset.

"One of the largest surveys of music consumers to closely examine the question of Digital Rights Management (DRM) has an important two-part message for the music industry."

DRM-free music sells at a much higher rate online than protected music, according to UK-based digital music store 7 Digital. In fact, customers buy it four times as often as they do DRMed music. As a result, almost 80 percent of the store's sales are of DRM-free content.

It seems that a full scale mutiny and rebellion against the music labels has begun. Several major bands, including Oasis, Jamiroquai and Radiohead as well as rock band "Throwdown" have gone together to encourage their fans to download their music. The bands are doing this because they've realized that by allowing the fans to share music, they're selling more music in the end.

Despite the recent announcement of "DRM-free" music tracks by Apple and Amazon.com, Digital Rights Management (DRM) is not about to go away. At least, that's the main conclusion of a report, "Digital Rights Management Update," made available this week by the market research firm In-Stat.

If you're into DRM-free music, you have a reason to get pretty excited today. As speculated, Amazon has launched the public beta of its new digital music portal called Amazon MP3, which will feature two million songs from 180,000 artists and 20,000 labels,

"...Stallman, the widely-recognized founder of the free software movement, argued in front of a Yale Political Union audience of about 125 students that companies should not be allowed to use digital restrictions management to limit the rights of software users.