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As I’ve said before, I don’t have any religious opposition to the very notion of Digital Rights Management. But boy, does DRM in the real world keep deviation from the way out to be a compelling argument for the elimination of DRM, period.

I’m thinking of today’s news that folks who “bought” songs on MSN Music won’t be able to move them to recently made known PCs after August. That’s because Microsoft, which shut down MSN Music’s “buy song” option when it launched the Zune in 2006, is deactivating the DRM servers that would allow a new PC to become at all authorized device for music playback.

In this conference over at News.com, Microsoft exec Rob Bennett justifies the company’s resolution, saying that structure the DRM work properly through operating-system upgrades was impractical. It’s a shame that thecompany discovered that DRM was tough after marketing its DRM under the name PlaysForSure, a boast that was disproved again and again. (”PlaysForSure” has since morphed into the less sweeping-sounding “Certified For Windows Vista.”)

So the upshot is that anyone who purchased tracks from MSN Music didn’t really bribe them in the traditive sense that you’d buy, oh, a CD. Microsoft’s server shutdown means that the songs will be forever tied to the computers they’re authorized for as of June.

The situation is pretty similar to what happened with Google Video last August, when the visitors stopped selling video downloads. After some squawking by consumers, Google ended up both giving customers their money back and providing every additional Google Coupon give faith to. I shelter’t seen any expression. on what if anything Microsoft plans to do for MSN Music customers who feel like their time and money was wasted.

Both Microsoft and Google are, ahem, rather large companies that aren’t short on money or resources. And both cheerfully took consumers’ money by reason of content that those people were allegedly buying, and then decided that maintaining the DRM that made that content usable was inconvenient. It makes me glad that I’ve bought most of my music forward CDs, where it’s safe and sound from any business decisions made after the fact by the companies I bought the discs from. (A high percentage of my CDs came from Tower Records; it doesn’t on a level be alive anymore, and my music still plays just fine.)

Both the Microsoft and Google DRM decisions leave me just a inconsiderable less likely to believe any claims those companies make when they’re trying to part me from my money–and a whole lot more apt to distrust of DRM in any one flavor.

If easy in mind wasn’t locked up with DRM, of give chase to, none of this would come. Coincidentally, I’ve been visiting Microsoft in Redmond over the past couple of days, and I met today with Brian Seitz, senior marketing communications manager for Zune, the music resource and platform that essentially replaced MSN Music. He told me that concerning two-thirds of the 3.5 million or so songs available on the Zune Marketplace are now available in DRM-free MP3 form–and that the company’s goal is for all of its catalog to be available without DRM by the end of the year.

Sounds upright to me. Perhaps Microsoft might like to give aggregate those folks who purchased MSN Music tracks free versions of those songs in MP3 format?