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MSN Music DRM Servers Going Dark In September
PDQ Back writes to tell us about an email Microsoft sent to former customers of MSN Music today. The company said it would be turning off the DRM servers used to authorize playback of music purchased from the now-defunct MSN Music store. "'As of August 31, 2008, we will no longer be able to support the retrieval of license keys for the songs you purchased from MSN Music or the authorization of additional computers,' reads the e-mail. This doesn't just apply to the five different computers that PlaysForSure allows users to authorize, it also applies to operating systems on the same machine (users need to reauthorize a machine after they upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista, for example). Once September rolls around, users are committed to whatever five machines they may have authorized — along with whatever OS they are running."
MSFT has a lot of power, and they can't use it properly. Sure they have incorrect philosophies, but they should at least be able to EXECUTE them... but they can't.
Personally if I ever get that much power, I would like to be able to use it to achieve what I want. What would you do with that much power?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
The worst thing to do to greedy RIAA asshats is to share really free music. There's more high quality music at that one site than you can listen to over the next 100 years.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It won't affect those of us in California with nice consumer protection laws and prior case law against End-User License Agreements as far as I'm aware of. We'll have our compensation somehow.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Actually...
Would that be illegal? If you purchased the music through MSN, and then downloaded an MP3 of the same song, would there be a case against you?
Well, to follow up on the parent poster's car metaphor, it's basically like saying they're not going to make any new parts for your car, so you can drive it just fine now but if you want to change anything at all in the future, you can't, and if anything breaks and you need to replace it, you're screwed.
E pluribus unum
Would it cost them a huge amount of money to keep the server running? I doubt it. Compared to stuff like Windows update it's a tiny drop in the ocean.
It's almost as if they *want* this to be a lesson to somebody...nah, couldn't be...
No sig today...
Not at all the same.
With a car, even if whoever made it stops making parts, other suppliers could and likely would continue to supply parts.
No one else can legally authorize Microsoft's DRM for you.
i.e. with the car you still have hope, with DRMed music, you're screwed.
Which is why they say "Own it on CD today" or in the case of movies "own it on DVD today" ?
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Okay, first skip the obvious answer ... it was a rhetorical question.
They don't want to support it. Fair enough, stop issuing anymore of these types of DRM keys.
Now, what would cost them to keep this operational for a few years? 2 dedicated servers? 10? 20? 2 full-time staff for 5 to 10 more years to support this and use the existing datacentre support folks for the basic 24/7 stuff. Let's round it to a nice $2.5 million for 10 years. Not a whole lot for a large company.
What heat will they get from this? This is a PR fiasco for their DRM technology in general and more importantly shows that MS is willing to leave their "followers" high and dry when it suits them. What will these pissed off users do next time? Yeah, get iTunes, pirate, avoid music altogether, and better yet, avoid MS products. Potential revenue loss from 10,000 stranded users? Probably a few million. Think about: these folks PAID for DRM music. Easy sheep to get money from. They're killing their cash cow.
Someone at the MS marketing or client services department needs to get axed.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
I can't find the link at the moment but I've read that MS has stated that they would release a patch that would permanently disable XP's activation requirements when final support ends.
If someone has the link, post away.
Gone!
Is there any chance they will do the right thing and provide a conversion utility to convert the DRM songs into non-DRM songs so the purchaser doesn't have the songs stolen back from them. If not, I smell a lawsuit..
The truth shall set you free!
so, can anyone post a copy of the EULA from back when the agreement was first made? Not that EULA's are worth the electrons they're written with, but I'd be curious to see what both parties agreed to, and if anything remotely like the current situation was hinted at...
A side question: can Microsoft really not afford to just keep these servers running? I guess they're having some problems with Vista being a flop and all, but how expensive can it be to maintain these servers? On the other hand, I don't particularly blame Microsoft for this situation. It's an inherent problem with DRM, and it was bound to happen to someone sooner or later.
Maybe it doesn't matter if they shut it down, because no one is using it?
As for MSN DRM going dark it makes just another example of how DRM equals screwed. Not to mention why anyone would pay good money for DRM audio that'll suck the life right out of your MP3 player is beyond me. Just to see how much overhead it caused for myself I took a non-DRMed set of WMA tracks and put them on my new Sandisk M260. On any of the 3 Sandisk M2XX players my family owns (gotta love how you can change batteries while on the road!) we get an average of 17-20 hours of play, depending on how much track skipping we do. After setting the player to only play the WMA tracks and putting in a fresh battery I BARELY got 11 hours. And if that is WMA without DRM I'd hate to see how much less time I would get with DRM.
Has anyone tried their MP3 player with DRMed WMA like that on MSN? How much quicker did it suck down your battery? Does Apple's Fairplay suck the life out of iPods like WMA sucks it out of MP3 players? But of course this is my 02c based on my own experience with WMA files, YMMV.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Now here is my big concern: The same thing could happen for games, with Valve building up an ever-increasing selection of titles on Steam.
...
When I buy a Steam game, I pay money and then the game is permanently activated in my Steam account. Aside from the fact I can't transfer it to another account, and Valve can shutdown my account at will, IF Steam ever did "go dark", then I wouldn't have any games left
It's worse for games because unlike music, you really have no choice (for certain games) whether you want to buy them on Steam or not.
The reality is that copies of music are sold, not licensed. Title 17 does not provide for any licensing of a work to someone for use in the home. Search for the word "license" in Title 17 if you don't believe me. Every instance refers to licensing the right to copy it. The right to play a legally produced copy of music that was legally obtained is pretty soundly covered under "Fair Use". Therefore, a third party taking away the ability to play music that you own without providing a replacement effectively constitutes theft of property, and should be punished accordingly with jail time for the top people at the record companies and Microsoft plus civil liability. No contract can allow a company to violate the law, period. Such a clause would be considered an illegal agreement, and thus would not be upheld in court.
That said, if we naively believe the music industry's misinformation and consider it a license, Chapter 2, section 203 lays out what they have to do so revoke that license. Let's just say it would be cheaper for them to mail a copy of every song out on CD. Among other things, it requires them to provide an advance notice in writing to every single person who received the license, which must be signed by the copyright holders, must provide the effective date of termination, and can never occur under any circumstances prior to the 35th anniversary of the grant. Even such a revocation would not remove your rights to private listening of the material, however, as the copyright act explicitly disclaims any interest in covering such use of the material in Chapter 1, section 110:
That said, if this is a nonexclusive copyright license, however, and even if you believe that somehow the EULA manages to trump Title 17, unless there is a termination clause, they cannot revoke that license without cause, and even if there is, a court will almost certainly hold such a clause to be unconscionable, particularly in light of the implied promise that the music "plays for sure", the fundamental inequality of the two parties, and the fact that for most of the people involved, the only way to obtain the music on a per-track basis in a way that was compatible with their devices was through one of a handful of services all operating under license from Microsoft, all with the same contract terms.
In short, the case would be about as open and shut as a copyright-related lawsuit can get, and Microsoft and the recording industry would be on the losing end of it.... While normally I would say that the only people who win such a case are the lawyers, even a win for the lawyers in this case would be a great win for the public as a whole, as it would establish precedent for the legal responsibility incumbent upon music publishers who choose to use restrictive DRM. and any such precedent in that area would be a positive change over the current state of the industry.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Personally I think this is fantastic news. I am sorry to the MSN customers who are being shafted by this but it proves that DRM is crap. I have had dozens of discussions with people over the past few years (since iTMS) about how DRM is evil and everybody always replies with "Yeah but will never do that! Stop being a silly paranoid fool". Examples like this are just ammo in the fight against DRM. Tell everybody who supports DRM'd media about it.
Also part of me wonders if Microsoft are doing this on purpose? I know it sounds weird as Microsoft are not anti-DRM however they run thousands of redundant servers but keep them around because it makes no difference to them. So why retire just these servers? I find it difficult to believe they see very high load. If you read between the lines it also reads as if they are doing this to damage DRM more than anything else.
Right. We can't resell copies of it. In other words, we don't own the copyright.
But you would probably further argue that ownership means the right to listen to it, correct? Or would you lump this in with copy? That is, to listen to it, it needs to be transformed into a copy as sound waves before it hits our ears and becomes a copy of the music in our memory? But does it stop there? Are we in possession of stolen music if we listen to it in our heads at will (as in "that song won't get out of my head--you know the one, from the Charlie Brown movie where they went to camp").
But, where does it end, Charlie Brown? Is this what artists intend? I would argue, having written some songs myself, and having my own art grace the cover of magazines, that this is not what artists intend. I would suspect that other artists are like me in that they feel like their work exists for the world and that its value is not in the money required to purchase a copy of it, but in the pleasure or thought it provokes.
Just callin' it like I see it.
If I remember correctly, the logic was that Apple is a "Good" company, and that the DRM is only there because record labels require it. For now, they're accepting this, so they can become so big that that no record label could ever survive without iTunes sales. Once the power shifts, they *could* demand from the record labels that music is sold without DRM.
You know, the current DRM-free offerings on iTunes cost just a little more, not only because the record label wants it, but also because a few cents more is enough to thwart any regular user, who will then generate the same amount of pennies to Apple for only being able to use their products.
Every company loves DRM. It's only the users who don't want it - and why should anybody care about them?
So yeah, it really wouldn't surprise me if he has an embedded from deity knows when doing some specialized job that would be too expensive to replace. The mill owner said the pc and lathe cost them nearly $80K back in the day and a replacement would be so expensive they would never make their money back with the limited amount of custom columns they sell. So last I heard my original gamer rig which I used to run DOOM and Quake on is happily making scroll work on columns and posts while running DOS 3 as a custom lathe controller. Just goes to show you never know when that old junk in the closet might be useful again.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I don't really care what Microsoft's motive is,
I only care that I have $1000 worth of songs that are now worthless.
That's fraud.
If I was a lawyer, I'd file a class-action lawsuit for the benefit of the MSN Store's customers, demanding either a full refund, or the ability to download a perpetual license with no expiration date.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
P.S.
Since I'm not a lawyer, as soon as I get home, I'll copy the songs to my audio cassette deck.* I may try burning some CDs, but I don't think Microsoft's DRM allows us to do that. Videocassettes* are another alternative for storage that I might try.
* (Compact Cassette - a 1970s-era technology that uses Analog tape storage to defeat digital copyright; compact cassette features CD quality sound with 20-22,000 hertz and 70 db dynamic range. Videocassettes have similar properties.)
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Just yesterday I was looking for a song that I wanted to buy. It's not available on iTunes Plus (DRM Free) or the Amazon MP3 store.
I found a copy of the whole album used on Amazon for $.96.
So I legally bought the whole copy protection free album for less than the cost of the single DRM laden song.
I felt kinda odd because I haven't purchased a physical CD in over 10 years.
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Oh, and for the guy that wanted me to "spill" about how much I got for it, I sold him that one plus a Pentium 266Mhz and set them both up with DOS 3 for $200. Which i think is a pretty good deal considering that between the two he'll probably get another 20+ years out of that lathe,LOL! I set it up so he has the spare in a really clean spot in a nice temperature controlled part of the office back room and told him and his son to be sure to boot it up at least once a month to keep the hard drive from locking up. I also gave his son a disk image of the OS with the lathe program installed so if the hard drive dies it won't take anything to get her going again.
The amazing thing was the 20Mhz was still running! The PSU had finally starting to get flaky and would cut out intermittently and of course since it was from the bad old days of proprietary everything we didn't have a PSU that would fit. The guy was just so happy to have it back we probably could have charged triple and he wouldn't have complained,LOL! The other shops he went to told him it would be AT LEAST a couple of weeks until they could buy an old box online or track one down and he had a customer waiting on some custom columns for his new house, so he was about to lose a nice bit of cash. I worked on the boxes during the night and had him set up before noon the next day. Man, i can't believe there would be someone else here that actually worked on one of those old ISA lathes. What are the odds,huh?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.