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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."
Come on, guys, what does it take so long to tag this story with the 'haha' tag??? Are you all asleep?
"Children won't be rediscovering momy and daddys 20 year old records in the future. DRM could cause an entire generations music to be lost."
Oh no! How will our descendants survive without being able to appreciate the lyrical genius of K-Fed, NSYNC, and My Chemical Romance? It really is the end of the world!
*torrents comment*