The crack of the bat, the smell of the grass and the pain of losing your purchased content to DRM deactivation. In what can only be called the biggest bonehead move since Bill Buckner's error in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, Major League Baseball has deactivated a DRM license server used to verify your worthiness to play back video of games you purchased online.

Due to an earlier decision to switch DRM providers, MLB's new content and old content are managed by different license authentication servers. After making the switch, MLB has arbitrarily decided it has no intention of honoring its earlier commitments to fans who purchased downloaded games under the old system, thereby rendering many fans shut-out.

Claiming the full-game downloads were "one-time sales", MLB is completely unapologetic to fans who've lost their purchased content to the horrors of DRM death. Quoted on Boing Boing, baseball super-fan and author Alan Wood writes, "Just got off the phone with a MLB customer service supervisor. [who said] 'MLB no longer supports the DDS system' that it once used and so any CDs with downloaded games on them 'are no good. They will not work with the current system.'"

Shame on you Major League Baseball, this is fraud. We've warned Download Squad readers that buying DRM "protected" media is a crap-shoot, but when issuing those warnings we were mostly concerned about smaller media sales outlets going out-of-business in an ever evolving digital media landscape. This goes so far beyond those fears, with an active and profitable business making a clear and informed decision to yank the DRM rug out from under your purchased content.

Is it any wonder non-drm downloads via P2P are so popular? It's not simply about "free" in the base, capitalist notion of how much money changed hands, it's more pointedly about "freedom", the freedom to do what you wish with the content you've collected. If consumers aren't given options which allow them to get their content free as in freedom, they'll take that content free as in beer.

Steve Jobs released an open letter to iTunes critics yesterday entitled, "Thoughts on Music" in which he discusses DRM, the major label system and why iTunes isn't "open."

Ok, so in points the letter is factually incorrect. It tends to over-simplify the DRM debate by discounting any open alternative. As a well-known and widely read enemy of DRM, I'll take it. In Steve's own words, "Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven't worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy." He's right, and I've said nearly the exact same thing before, as have many others.

The simple fact is Steve has hopped on the bandwagon of industry figures proclaiming the death of DRM for music. Naysayers swore this day would never come and, they might have been right save for the constant downward pressure provided by groups like Defective By Design, music blogs of all stripes and genres as well as the actions of several European countries. I'm not at all convinced that Jobs' changed stance comes from an altruistic place deep within his stylishly dressed torso but, all the same, I welcome him to the right side of the argument.

The Haz-Mat suited activists of DefectiveByDesign gained quite a bit of exposure when they waltzed into Apple stores across the country carrying signs and informing customers about the rights they give up when buying DRM controlled music from the iTunes Music Store.

Our sister site, The Digital Music Weblog (she prefers to be called TDMW for short) caught up with the crafty folks at DefectiveByDesign for an interview about Digital Rights Management. DefectiveByDesign is an offshoot of the Free Software Foundation, the non-profit organization that maintains and defends the GNU General Public License, better known for providing the legal framework under which the myriad Linux distributions exist.

If you have any concerns about your rights in a digitally encoded future, you should read this interview. The folks at DefectiveByDesign aren't alone when they predict a bleak digital landscape ahead, where the content providers and device manufacturers are able to lock you in, and keep you from buying competing products by holding your media hostage.