There’s an extremely robust (some would call it fat and some would even venture to call it phat) American tradition of exposing corporations for their misdeeds. People like Ida Tarbell and Ralph Nader have made Americans think about the products they consume and the corporations next door. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that’s a healthy part of a capitalist democracy.

But great gains in technology and Internet usage have changed the way consumers, well, consume. With digital music technology, consumers aren’t even buying hard-copy products anymore. We’re buying “electronic song files,” whatever that means. And when we buy products we can barely comprehend, it’s easier for corporations to take advantage of our rights.

First, the scope of the problem: Digital music has exploded (duh). College market research firm Student Monitor polled over 1,200 college students and found the iPod is more popular than beer on campus. And when there’s iPod, there’s iTunes, the most popular digital music service in the world. February 22 marked the one billionth song purchase using the program.

But here’s where our lack of knowledge about technology betrays us, where the Internet tricks you by throwing its second-most-popular beer in your eyes and stepping on your foot: Apple still owns all of those billion-plus songs sitting on private computers across the country.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) software embedded within each song sold on iTunes means you only license the song from Apple. This kind of technology allows Apple to effectively control the song you bought on your PC. Apple can change this technology at any time, even after you’ve bought the song and “own” it.

And in 2005, Sony BMG caused a public scandal when savvy consumers started finding “rootkit” DRM software embedded on some of their CDs. These rootkits uploaded silent programs untraceable by normal security measures. And if you tried to delete it, you risked your computer crashing. Sony had effectively put a form of spyware on its customers’ computers.

So much of this will sound foreign to many Americans. I don’t even have a great grasp of it, but I do know that I want to know when corporations are entering my computer and controlling the way I use purchased products. The Internet used to inherently mean mass deregulation, a massive thunderclap storm of raining information that got everyone wet with democracy. But now corporations are opening their own umbrellas, so high we can’t even see them. They’re controlling the rain, and we don’t even know we’re almost dry.

With digitized personal information, electronic voting and TiVo all getting the DRM treatment, we may be in for a steep learning curve about how we are affected. Peter Lee, an executive at Disney, told The Economist, “If consumers even know there’s a DRM, what it is, and how it works, we’ve already failed.” At least that puts us back where we started in consumer activism: knowledge as the ultimate power. We need to know how we purchase digital commodities. Get out there and get wet. Phat.

Reach Matt Weir at [email protected].