Say goodbye to hassles with copy protection on your music downloads. Steve Jobs expects that, by the end of the year, 50% of the songs sold on iTunes will be DRM-free.

I’ve never been as down on DRM (digital rights management) as a lot of folks, but I’ve always figured that the market would eventually get fed up with all those pesky restrictions–how many computers can I play this thing on? what do I do when I get a new iPod?–to the point that it would go away. And behold, the market works.