It's looking less and less likely that the future of online music won't have DRM dictating to us what we can do with our files. However, there may be some consellation to be found in a new project being spearheaded by Sun, the Open Media Commons.
The idea behind Sun's Open Media Commons is to get contributors to "develop royalty-free open standards for digital content and commit to cross-industry growth and prosperity, ensuring both intellectual property protection and user privacy." We already seen that closed, proprietary DRM techniques are
impacting online music sales. Could an open DRM standard be the solution?