Yahoo! Music Going Dark, Taking Keys With It

iminplaya writes with a link to an excellent article at Ars Technica, extracting from it a few choice nuggets: "The bad dream of DRM continues. Yahoo e-mailed its Yahoo! Music Store customers yesterday, telling them it will be closing for good — and the company will take its DRM license key servers offline on September 30, 2008. Sure, it's bad news and yet another example of the sheer lobotomized brain-deadness that has characterized music DRM, but the reaction of most music fans will be: 'Yahoo had an online music store?'... DRM makes things harder for legal users; it creates hassles that illegal users won't deal with; it (often) prevents cross-platform compatibility and movement between devices. In what possible world was that a good strategy for building up the nascent digital download market? The only possible rationales could be 1) to control piracy (which, obviously, it has had no effect on, thanks to the CD and the fact that most DRM is broken) or 2) to nickel-and-dime consumers into accepting a new pay-for-use regime that sees moving tracks from CD to computer to MP3 player as a 'privilege' to be monetized."

Comments

Pirate

[aussie_a]

This is one case where I condone pirating. Its what I'd do if I liked any of your new fandangled noise.

Say what?

[Foerstner]

You get them home and they may work, and they may continue to work. If they do, you might have got a good deal, but there is absolutely no guarantee that they will work, nor that they will continue to work in the future. In contrast, DRM-free goods are guaranteed to work for as long as you want them to. In contrast, DRM-free goods are guaranteed to work for as long as you want them to.

If anything, you get a better after-sale guarantee with a DRM'ed product, because they're produced by companies that want you to keep doing business with them (eg. iTunes, Windows Genuine Advanage.) Most DRM-free products (eg. CDs, Linux) come with no guarantee of any effort at continued functionality.

Sure, a skilled or educated user/hacker can use and extend unrestricted products without restrictions, but that's far from a guarantee. That's a user exercising his rights and skills.