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The Day The Music Died: Windows Media and DRM
SampleMinded writes "The Guardian reports on an early glimpse of what a DRM controlled future looks like. Imagine backing up your files, reformatting your hard drive, then copying the files back over only to find your music no longer works. It happened to this guy. Now That's what I call Xperience!"
It happened to my fiancee. She backed up her music made using Real Jukebox to her D drive. We re-formatted drive C and re-installed Windows. Of course, not having saved the security key, when she restored her music files she couldn't play them.
As always, the honest people suffer.
You don't even have to try to reload backed up data to get bit by this. Not too long ago, I upgraded my processor and was subsequently locked out of all the media files I made using Media Player.
I was less then pleased, for obvious reasons. It was just a minor headache remaking files using other programs and such, but it was a minor headache I could have lived without.
Actually, his first mistake was not disabling the 'Personal Protection' feature ... this would have solved his problem just as well as using another product.
(Score:-1, Wrong)
When updating my soundcard drivers recently, I discovered a notice of Digital Rig^H^Hestrictions Management from Creative Labs. Apparently copy protected "intellectual property content" causes the digital output of the sound card to be shutoff. Of course this only works on WMAs, so I believe this fits in the context of this article. For more information visit this URL Creative Labs: DRM with WMA