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Western Digital Service Restricts Use of Network Drives

Posted by Zonk on from the drm-means-don't-read-disk dept.

sehlat writes "Via BoingBoing comes the news that Western Digital's My Book(TM) World Edition(TM) II, sold with promises of internet-accessible drive space, is now restricting the types of files the drive will serve up. 'Western Digital is disabling sharing of any avi, divx, mp3, mpeg, and many other files on its network connected devices; due to unverifiable media license authentication. Just wondering -- who needs a 1 Terabyte network-connected hard drive that is prohibited from serving most media files? Perhaps somebody with 220 million pages of .txt files they need to share?'" Update: 12/07 03:28 GMT by Z : To clarify, it actually seems as though this is a bad summary. The MioNET service that WD packages with the networked drives is responsible for the rights of users via the network. There are a few (obvious) ways to get around that.

4 of 315 comments (clear)

  1. They'll be selling LOTS of these! by tubegeek · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Not.

  2. False Advertising? by dark_requiem · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Here's a good one: the product description page for the drive lists its approximate capacity for storing different media types. They specifically state that it can hold approximately: 500,000 songs (MP3) 800 hours of DVD quality video Then, in their list of restricted files, it states that you cannot share MP3 or VOB files. Seems to me that this borders on fraudulent advertising: "You can use this device to store and share as much data as 500,000 MP3 songs, but you can't actually share MP3 songs." Granted, they have a bullet-point which indicates that common media formats cannot be used, but then why are they using those same formats to illustrate the capacity of the drive?

  3. This post is funny... by rockabilly · · Score: 1, Redundant

    In a sarcastic sort of way. Here's a comment that someone left:

    According to the WD site one of the benefits of the drive is that you can:

    "Listen to the music on your My Book World Edition drive while you're on vacation."

    and it can hold:
    Up to 571,000 digital photos
    Up to 500,000 songs (MP3)
    Up to 50,000 songs (uncompressed CD quality)
    Up to 100 hours of Digital Video (DV)
    Up to 800 hours of DVD quality video
    Up to 200 hours of HD video

    See for yourself at http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?DriveID=340

  4. Rename? by PPH · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Just slap a .TXT extension on the end and suddenly, your files are legal!!!

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.