Yahoo has become perhaps the first major provider of digital media downloads to offer popular music downloads with no digital rights management (DRM) build in.

This means that once you buy and download the MP3, you can put it anywhere you want, on any computer or MP3 player you want, without being impeded by a proprietary copy protection scheme.

Readers of the Internet Patrol may remember the problems which Sony had with their digital rights management software, which lead to security holes on customers’ computers, and a lawsuit against Sony for the damage done by their DRM software.

Yahoo is the first big player to do away with all that.

“Our position is simple: DRM doesn’t add any value for the artist, label, or consumer, the only people it adds value to are the technology companies who are interested in locking consumers to a particular technology platform,” explained Ian Rogers, Director of Yahoo Product Management.

“As you know, we’ve been publicly trying to convince record labels that they should be selling MP3s for a while now,” added Rogers.

This should make things very interesting.

The first offering includes Jessica Simpson’s “A Public Affair”, which you can download - DRM free - from the Yahoo Music Store.