I’ve been reading Valleywag for the past couple months, and enjoy their mix of humor and commentary a great deal. However, they have one habit that I find extremely annoying. Take a look at this post. For some reason, when they mention a company or person, they feel the need to link that mention to their internal page about every story that is tagged with that person’s or company’s name, rather than to the person’s blog or company URL itself. So instead of going to the company they are talking about, I click on the link and get another Valleywag page with stories about that company, then I have to go on a scavenger hunt to find the real page for that company. Annoying!

A few days ago when Apple/EMI non-DRM’ed music was the hot story of the day, CNBC’s Power Lunch ran a clip about it. After the clip ran, Bill Griffeth wondered aloud about how that couldn’t be good for their business, because those files would surely appear on the peer-to-peer networks.

I’m guessing Bill hasn’t logged on to any of those networks lately. Approximately .2 seconds after a CD hits store shelves, there are thousands of DRM-free copies of those songs on the networks. Half of the time, those albums have somehow “slipped out” of the studios hands onto the networks several weeks before the official release.

Until the studios can plug the CD-to-P2P network hole, releasing DRM-free songs and getting paid for them is a no-brainer.