CibbuanoYahoo Music closing, DRM rears its ugly head
July 30th 2008 06:35
DRM is the crazy scheme that the recording industry has promoted as a solution against piracy... in the case of Yahoo Music, customers could buy song titles, but they'd use the internet access to verify the ownership of the file. Seems easy, right? You own the file, you try to play it, your computer checks to make sure that you own it.
Well, this all breaks down when you think of your rights as a consumer... can you backup these files? Can you play them on a different computer? If your internet access goes down, can you still play music?
And, as we've seen here, if the company goes out of business, and they shut down their DRM servers, can you still play the files?
From the sarcastic ArsTechnica post:
"Once the Yahoo store goes down and the key servers go offline, existing tracks cannot be authorized to play on new computers. Instead, Yahoo recommends the old, lame, and lossy workaround of burning the files to CD, then reripping them onto the computer. Sure, you'll lose a bunch of blank CDs, sound quality, and all the metadata, but that's a small price to pay for the privilege of being able to listen to that music you lawfully acquired. Good thing you didn't download it illegally or just buy it on CD! "
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Comment by Cheryl J
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Once again the consumer gets screwed. It's the reason The Pirate Bay boys are so popular.
Comment by Cibbuano
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... also, Yahoo! announced that customers would get refunds, I think.
Comment by StephenT
Why did they decide to close it down? They were just not gaining any traction against iTunes?
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Comment by Cibbuano
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