LMFAO. All hail the "open" OS! Yes open. Except when we close it.
Open as in "open wide!"

I maybe missing something here, but does this mean that Google has access to your Android Phone's OS 24/7? Can they access a phone and change it's setting at, almost, any given time?

I don't know when people will realize that Google is an "Ad" company. That company is so black that people just don't recognize it's true colors.

I would go with MS anyday. Atleast they are openly greedy. Once you pay the money, that's yours. You do anything with it. Heck, you can put itunes songs on Zune, try putting outside mp3's on those ipods...

So much for the open mobile os Android....ha...I am sticking with WinMob where I can shove any damn thing I like.

Get lost google.

try putting outside mp3's on those ipods...
are you kidding?...
i own an ipod, i have a itunes store log in (to get my album artwork) but i have yet to purchase any songs (protected or not) from itunes.
every single one of my mp3s plays fine on the ipod. even if i have something in an incompatible .wma format that isnt protected then it can just be converted to .acc to work with the ipod.
keep with ms.. anti everything else.. its people with your line of thinking that allow competition to flourish..

Putting those outside MP3s on your iPod is fine if you like being forced to index them all through the terrible iTunes software.... thankfully some smart folk created alternatives.

My experience suggests Apple's hardware/software locking methods are generally worse than Microsoft's, though. I don't want to have to index/use iTunes just to copy a track to my iPod. If I had an iPhone, yet again - no, I don't want to have to use iTunes to do things with it. And I don't want to buy hardware that is OS locked, or an OS that is hardware locked (and keeping in mind, if newer hardware comes along, that older OS installation disk won't always recognise it and can fail - trust me, I work with macs, I've experienced this). Sure, go go competition!

On topic: it's a good loophole to close, in my view. If people want their apps to be pay-for, loopholes like this need to be closed.

Android is supposedly an open OS. Putting functionality in it specifically to limit what the user can do seems counter to the entire philosophy.

Google needs to warn posters of "for pay" content that Google offers no protection from the copying and sharing of those apps and then remove any and all forms of protection.

Then the developers can decide if they want to code for Android or not.

We've got the closed, locked platform (iPhone). I was hoping Android would be the opposing side to this issue so we could see some clear decision by users as to their preference and whether the market would react favorably to it (few, if any "for pay" apps and a plethora of donated (OSS) apps, or not (a dead space).

So much for that hope.

After reading the link that talks about "busting" the encryption. I understand now. The "protected" apps are not protected at all. They are apparently just put into a different folder from unprotected apps. And I'm guessing with unlocked phones, you are able to browse through the file structure on the phone and move files whereever you want.

Google didn't do anything to the devices. They made a change to the marketplace server, so that it doesn't return copy-protected app listings to the marketplace app being run on an dev phone. Simple as that.

As a dev phone owner, I'm quite pissed off at it, since there's more rooted G1 users than dev phone users, and they're doing exactly what Google fears (and IMO are more likely to do it). All Google did with this was piss off the people who put their apps in the marketplace to begin with, while doing nothing to solve the real problem of rooted phones being able to exploit the system. I'd be more forgiving if they blocked ALL rooted phones from those apps, but really, they need a better control method. It isn't even right to call it DRM - they're simply installing the application to a protected directory that only the root user has access to.