OverDrive? No, wrong gear!

Nearly forgot about the other part of this activity, I went to take a look at the Overdrive Downloadable Media page, browsed through the catalogue and found a few language learning resources that I would have liked to 'borrow'. When I started to investigate what needed to be done, I found that the content uses copy protection only available on Windows computers. The explanatory note states: 

Our media titles, provided by OverDrive, Inc., use DRM (Digital Rights Management) protection technology from Microsoft Corporation. Unfortunately the iPod (and Mac) currently support neither DRM-protected Windows Media Audio (.wma) files nor Window Media Video (.wmv) files.

What it really should say is that OverDrive Inc have chosen a technology that is only supported by Microsoft on their own platform. If they had used iTunes for delivery then it would be available for both Windows and Mac users. This illustrates the problem with archiving content in a proprietary format that may not exist in the future.

OK, I'll get down off my soapbox now ;-)