Wal-Mart Ends DRM Support

An anonymous reader writes "So, you thought you did well to support the fledgling music industry by purchasing your tracks legally from the Wal-Mart store? Well, forget about moving these tracks to a new PC! Since they started selling DRM-free tracks last year, there's no money to be made in maintaining the DRM support systems, and in fact, support is being shut down. Make sure you circumvent the restrictions by burning the tracks to an old-fashioned CD before Wal-mart 'will no longer be able to assist with digital rights management issues for protected WMA files purchased from Walmart.com.' Support ends October 9th."

Comments

refund

[poopdeville]

I don't know Wallyworld's terms of service, but are the customers within their rights to demand refunds?

Re:refund

[CastrTroy]

They can demand all they want. Doesn't mean they will get it. Also this is yet another reason why DRM is evil. There is no money in continuing to maintain the DRM servers once you stop selling music. Once whoever you buy from decides to stop support, you are out of luck. This is the third service that I have heard of shutting down. I'm sure more will come in the future. I'm not sure how long it will take for people to realize just how bad DRM is.

Re:refund

[EastCoastSurfer]

Wal-mart for all its problems is pretty liberal with its return policy. My guess is that if you could talk to someone who even knew they sold music online they would either a) give you a refund or b) give you the tracks again DRM-free.

Re:refund

[Anonymous Coward]

So the moral of the story is that if you are willing to commit fraud you can get free cereal.

Re:refund

[poopdeville]

They can demand all they want. Doesn't mean they will get it.

You ignored my question in favor of going on a rant.

Obviously, they have the right to say what they want. I was asking if their demands are supported by law. Perhaps under an implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for purpose. Also, the TOS could have terms relating directly to the shutdown of the service.

Re:refund

[Techguy666]

I don't know Wallyworld's terms of service, but are the customers within their rights to demand refunds?

I suspect it depends on whether they use the term "purchase" anywhere on the eula or site...

Re:refund

[Ritchie70]

Have to agree with this.

Walmart has very customer friendly return policies in their bricks-and-mortar stores.

The stores are pits, and the actual customer service sucks (I've stood at the pickup desk for a half hour just waiting for someone to show up and get my web order) but when you need to return something, they're very, very good about it.

Got some ugly crap for Christmas from your mother who, somehow, doesn't understand the concept of "gift receipts" and just says "if you don't like it, I got it at...." instead like it's still 1982?

If they can scan that particular piece of ugly crap and identify it as something they might have sold her, they'll give you back the current sale price on a gift card, so you can go buy juice and cereal. No hassles.

Target, on the other hand, are a bunch of bastards with crazy rules like "we'll take it, but you have to find something else to buy from the same department."

Re:refund

[Anonymous Coward]

He did answer it really. You can ask all you want but you can be damm sure that the walmart lawyers have already thought of this.

In a license or eula SOMEWHERE is a clause that lets wallyworld get away with this without giving refunds.

Really. one of the worlds biggest corporations vs. a bunch of suckers who downloaded DRM music. Who do you really think is going to get the short end of the stick? I mean really...

Re:refund

[ijakings]

Its not really free cereal, More like half price cereal.

Re:refund

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

I don't know if its a coincidence or not, but I had some well connected friends at Yahoo relay my message of an impending class action lawsuit in light of them shutting down their drm servers. Shortly there after they announced that you could get the same tracks from other services with out drm for free. Sadly, I never bought anything from walmart nor do I know anyone there. But if you have been burned I suggest you look into it. It won't end up helping you recoup many losses, but I think a successful class action lawsuit against drm would cause other potential users of it very weary. I used to be one of the biggest defenders of DRM'd music here on slashdot. Then yahoo schooled me in its stupidity. I'm simply not going to use anything that has DRM on it ( exception made for dvd's as they are easily converted to a drm less format).

Re:refund

[MooUK]

A second wrong may seem justified, but it does not make a right.

Morality is, of course, completely relative.

Re:refund

[electrictroy]

Sometimes in order to catch a thief, you have to use the tactics of a thief (deception, buying black market goods, and using weapons). Example: Dish Network sold me a digital tuner box which was so poorly-programmed, it barely worked. A few months later Dish released v1.06 with all the bugs removed, and since my warranty was still good, I asked to exchange boxes.

Dish refused saying they had no record of me as a customer. They lost the sale! Idiots. So since Dish effectively defrauded me, I decided to borrow a page from the same book. (1) I bought a brand-new revision v.106 box. (2) When the package arrived, I swapped the tuners and returned my defective v1.00 box. (3) I contacted my credit card company, explained the situation, and provided proof the item was returned to Dish. (4) The credit company reversed the charge. (5) It costs me about 5 dollars in postage, but at least now I have a working digital tuner.

Dish tried to scam me via selling a defective box, and failed. And now Walmart's trying to do the same thing; if necessary I would find a way to recover the money. Perhaps the credit card company could reverse the charge for this now-broken DRM and worthless Walmart music. If not there are other ways your credit card could help you recover the money you lost.

Re:refund

[rm999]

I would be amazed if they refuse to give refunds. Think about it - Walmart has deep pockets, they are still selling music (and still seeking to make a profit off it), and they don't have a monopoly on music.

Pissing off past customers isn't exactly good business practice, and (I hate to admit it) Walmart is actually run by very skilled businessmen.

Re:refund

[Khyber]

Except in California, where EULAs are on some very shaky legal ground.

Re:refund

[__aaqvdr516]

But three rights end up making a left!

Re:refund

[Ritchie70]

You can't really expect them to give you anything except what they're selling for without a receipt, can you? You could have bought it five minutes ago. If you'd had the receipt (or a gift receipt) and they'd given you $5 then I'd be mad.

Wish my mom would understand that.... we got $2 or something for a set of Christmas dishes that I'm sure she paid $20 for.

Re:refund

[Poltras]

What city are we talking about anyway? Cause we have some roads here where two lefts are needed to make a right. Just sayin'...

Re:refund

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, why go to court when you can take the law into your own hands.

Re:refund

[swb]

Baby stuff is very frequently shoplifted; low-income people have kids (lots!) that soil themselves as often as rich people's kids do, and they don't like cloth nappies any more than you do. So even though it doesn't make "sense", they had no idea what the providence of your diapers were; you could have bought them stolen for 20 cents on the dollar.

How hard was it to show them a driver's license, anyway?

Re:refund

[T-Bone-T]

You used something for 6 months and then expected a refund?! Then you threatened them with a chargeback that you might have not even qualified for? No wonder they weren't nice to you. Who do you think you are?

Re:refund

[Gandalf_Greyhame]

Except in California, where EULAs are on some very shaky legal ground.

EVERYTHING is on shaky ground in California http://quake.usgs.gov/recenteqs

Re:refund

[jargon82]

the rest being left angles?

Re:refund

[shoemilk]

Wasn't there also a ruling that said downloads off of P2P don't count as backups? Or was that something the RIAA was trying to push?

Re:refund

[Just Some Guy]

So even though it doesn't make "sense", they had no idea what the providence of your diapers were; you could have bought them stolen for 20 cents on the dollar.

But, again, I was making an exchange and not getting a refund. I was trading them something worth $X for something worth $(X-0.07). Even if I'd stolen the original package, they would be no worse off after the swap. It was a lot of inconvenience for no net difference.

How hard was it to show them a driver's license, anyway?

To show them? Not hard at all. To allow them to record the information like they wanted to do? That was more than I could accept.

In Massachusetts?

[Alex Pennace]

I wonder if this would count as an unfair and deceptive practice as described in Massachusetts G.L. 93A.

Re:In Massachusetts?

[dummondwhu]

It's more like them installing a new windshield in your car and then throwing a rock through it as you drive off the premises.

A change.

[Sasayaki]

An interesting change in the wind. Suddenly, DRM is not just bad for consumers but good for re-sellers, where the cost of pissing off your clientele has to be weighed vs the cost of producing DRM-laden product, but aside from being utterly useless it actually harms the company directly by costing it money.

This is something that companies will listen to- and quickly. I suspect that this begins the downward spiral of heavy-handed DRM.

At least, I hope so...

HAHAHA tag?

[zappepcs]

A lot of people said it, long ago. DRM won't work for this very reason (and many others) and now those who were legal, and honest, and bought DRM'd content have to suffer AGAIN. It's not just Wal-Mart, how many other content providers also shut down, or screwed their customers by dropping or changing the DRM.

Me? I'm still sitting back, waiting for the industry to calm down and pull their heads out. Punishing the customer won't stop the criminals, never will. Now that the US Dollar is about to be worth ... next to nothing, they will have to kiss customer's asses to get them to spend money. We'll see how this all plays out. Even the DOJ doesn't like the **AA's game plan. It's falling apart on them. Wal-Mart is NOT a small retailer. This is a large nail in the coffin that DRM will be put to rest in.

Re:HAHAHA tag?

[EastCoastSurfer]

People are STILL buying DRM tracks?? At this point I don't blame the retailers, but the consumer. Amazon has been selling DRM free tracks for a long time now, and they're usually cheaper to boot!

Re:HAHAHA tag?

[rohan972]

Anyone with ideas on how to educate the general population [on DRM]?

Shut down the Wal-Mart DRM servers.

Re:HAHAHA tag?

[TheRaven64]

Amazon's store, last time I checked, was US-only. iTunes covers a large percentage of the connected world, and there are still a lot of things that are on iTunes but not iTunes Plus.

Re:HAHAHA tag?

[EastCoastSurfer]

Amazon's store, last time I checked, was US-only

You mean the internet exists outside the US? :p

Re:HAHAHA tag?

[BronsCon]

Punishing the customer won't stop the criminals, never will.

That should read "Punishing the customer will increase the criminals' numbers, always will."

Almost had to re-buy all of their music...

[Doug52392]

My sister (who is obsessed with music) bought hundreds of dollars worth of music from Wal-Mart's music downloading service. Recently, her MP3 player started acting strange and refused to play any DRM songs, so I had to reformat the whole MP3 player and resync all of her music to it. (There was also serious filesystem corruption)

If Wal-Mart had ended their DRM support yesterday...

Re:Almost had to re-buy all of their music...

[astrosmash]

Most of the music people acquire falls out of fashion after a few short years. Nonetheless, it's always a good idea to backup your favorite music, regardless of the format in which it was purchased. Luckily, these days it has never been easier to do just that; there's really no excuse not to.

Re:DRM is dead

[Yvan256]

DRM Collector: Bring out yer dead.
Wal-Mart: Here's one.
DRM Collector: That'll be seventy-nine cents.
DRM'ed WMA File: I'm not dead.
DRM Collector: What?
Wal-Mart: Nothing. There's your seventy-nine cents.
DRM'ed WMA File: I'm not dead!
DRM Collector: 'Ere, he says he's not dead.
Wal-Mart: Yes he is.
DRM'ed WMA File: I'm not!
DRM Collector: He isn't.
Wal-Mart: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.
DRM'ed WMA File: I'm getting better.
Wal-Mart: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment.
DRM Collector: Well, I can't take him like that. It's against regulations.
DRM'ed WMA File: I don't want to go on the cart.
Wal-Mart: Oh, don't be such a baby.
DRM Collector: I can't take him.
DRM'ed WMA File: I feel fine.
Wal-Mart: Oh, do me a favor.
The Dead Collector: I can't.
Wal-Mart: Well, can you hang around for a couple of minutes? He won't be long.
DRM Collector: I promised I'd be at the Robinsons'. They've lost nine thousand music files today.
Wal-Mart: Well, when's your next round?
DRM Collector: Thursday.
DRM'ed WMA File: I think I'll go for a walk.
Wal-Mart: You're not fooling anyone, you know. Isn't there anything you could do?
DRM'ed WMA File: I feel happy! I feel happy!
[the DRM Collector glances up and down the street furtively, then silences the DRM'ed WMA File with his a whack of his club]
Wal-Mart: Ah, thank you very much.
DRM Collector: Not at all. See you on Thursday.
Wal-Mart: Right.

Re:DRM is dead

[ducomputergeek]

I don't see iTunes and FairPlay going anywhere anytime soon. Hell, even after their spat earlier in the year when NBC moved to Amazon after Apple said no to their pricing scheme is now back on iTunes. But then again, I've said Apple got it right years ago. Offers some kind of production the media companies want, yet once I download it, I am free do whatever I want, like burning to CD's, installing and playing on a number of PC's/MP3 players, etc. without a lot of hassles. In the end, consumers don't mind DRM so long as it is reasonable.

Obtrusive Draconian DRM designed to make you pay for every device you want to listen on, etc.. Yeah, that idea is pretty much dead.

Vote of no confidence

[Skapare]

DRM cannot be trusted. DRM retailers cannot be trusted to keep up the support. This is why people should never buy DRM.

Unexpected

[Minervine]

Having purchased a DRM track from Wal-Mart a long time ago to try out the service, I received an e-mail recently from them about the service shutdown. Interestingly enough, they provided this advice to users:

If you have purchased protected WMA music files from our site prior to Feb 2008, we strongly recommend that you back up your songs by burning them to a recordable audio CD. By backing up your songs, you will be able to access them from any personal computer.

I didn't expect them to okay users to resort to the analog-hole, something that many companies and legislators have been trying to stop for years. Will other DRM services be this forgiving when they shut down their servers?

Re:Unexpected

[Dutch Gun]

The WMA DRM protection system can explicitly allow or disallow users to burn CD audio from the encrypted files. It's not necessarily using the analog output, which would obviously have to be redigitized, resulting in further quality loss.

Also, they can't really stop the "analog hole" until they implant DRM-laden microchips in our ears, and forcibly encode all the world's audio sources. Or ban all consumer microphones and recording devices.

Re:Unexpected

[operagost]

Unless you have some sort of analog computer of which I am unaware, that waveform exists in memory as a digital representation. There would only be analog involved if, for some reason, you couldn't decode the WMA and had to play it back through the line-out of your sound card to another recording device.

Re:Unexpected

[NuclearKangaroo]

This isn't really that "forgiving" of an option. You're still getting screwed, because when you go to make an MP3 of your "backed up" tracks off of that Audio CD, you're going to be getting an audibly lower quality file for your troubles.

The music lost quality the first time it was compressed into the WMA format. Burning it to a CD doesn't further reduce the audio quality, but it doesn't undo the compression artifacts either. That second compression will further degrade your music.

Thanks WalMart! If this isn't already illegal, it must become so. I'm not voting for anyone who isn't going to do something about how badly consumers are being treated nowadays.

Re:DRM is dead

[Yvan256]

I only bumped into FairPlay two times.

The first is when I tried to move a DRM'ed AAC file to an old Win98SE laptop (so I simply went and got the same tune as an MP3 file from P2P, since I had already paid for the tune).

The second is when I tried to play a rented movie from another computer. Turns out, you can't watch the movie from another computer, it has to be on the one you rented the movie from (even if the other computer is in your list of 5 allowed computers). I could have moved the movie to my AppleTV or my iPod touch, but I needed to watch it on my laptop. It's annoying that rented movies don't have the same limitations as purchased ones.

Why not replace the DRM'ed songs with non-DRM'ed?

[ktappe]

I don't understand why they don't do the obvious--replace all customers' DRM'ed songs with the equivalent non-DRM'ed copy. Customers have their same tracks, WallyWorld doesn't have to maintain their DRM servers.

Oh, wait....the RIAA won't get to double-dip customers if that happens. Now I see.

And EA wonders...

[Sniper511]

...why we have a problem with their newest DRM model.

(Yes, I'm aware they claim they'll release a patch before they turn off the servers, but if they go bankrupt tomorrow and can't PAY anyone to develop said patch, then what?)

Re:And EA wonders...

[Nobody Real]

if they go bankrupt tomorrow and can't PAY anyone to develop said patch, then what? Just use the patch the pirates have been using since before the game was officially released.

Another one bites the dust

[fsterman]

Why isn't there a tracker page at Defective By Design for how many of these DRM services have died? Google's video, Yahoo's music service, MSN Music, MTV, MLB.tv, CSS, etc?

DRM's limited lifetime

[Adrian Lopez]

"But that's never going to happen to [DRM service X]. The company behind [DRM service X] is just too big and profitable!"

DRM Escrow

[peterofoz]

Companies that sell or license products with the built in DRM time bomb should have to put the keys to that product into a software escrow. The escrow acts as a kind of insurance against the company going out of business or to discontinue the service. This approach has been used by large companies for years to ensure the source code for the expensive new core system they bought from a start up would be around if the start up should fail. This will probably take some kind of government regulation to make it happen because individual consumers are too small to push this through. Anyone want to start such a service? It would probably just involve parking some servers in a data center with 2 or 3 spares in the box and maintaining them for 20 years. We can call it The National Museum of DRM Failure.

Re:DRM is dead

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

While I agree that fairplay is likely to be around for a fair while yet, it isn't all that structurally different from the DRM used in this case. Subscription service WMDRM phones home frequently, so a shutdown of the activation servers will actively hose you within 30 days or so; but ordinary "purchased" WMDRM tracks are playable for the life of activated machines, as with fairplay. If fairplay activation servers went down, you'd be exactly as hosed as the people in TFA(which is to say, as soon as you need to activate a new device).

Re:DRM is dead

[2sheds]

I wish to register a complaint...

support isn't free

[Chewbacon]

This is just an expected downfall to DRM. Why sell something you'd have to continue supporting when you could just sell something with little or no support such as DRM-free music? It's for the better. Every time I hear those three letters I roll my eyes.

something people are missing here

[Anonymous Coward]

Wal-Mart's music store didn't shut down. They just stopped doing DRM. That should be considered to be a good thing.

Has anyone thought about lobbying Wal-Mart to offer the DRM-free versions of the DRM tracks that customers had bought, perhaps by paying whatever difference in price there was? That is something that Wal-Mart management might be convinced to do; but it won't happen if all you do is scream at Wal-Mart for shutting down their DRM servers.

In other words, let's make this lemon into lemonade. Let's establish a precedent, that forces DRM stores to distribute DRM-free versions to the customers when the DRM store shuts down.

That, boys and girls, will kill DRM faster than the current tone of bitching and moaning on ./

Re:iTunes

[samkass]

I suspect the sale of DRMed music still exceeds the sale of non-DRMed music, thanks to the music label's insistence on Apple DRM'ing their music.

There, fixed that for ya. It's all up to the music labels. The only reason Amazon can sell DRM-free music is because the labels let them. And they don't let Apple, because they want Amazon to emerge as a competitor. Once distribution becomes a commodity again, the labels (who have a monopoly over the content) can jack prices back up. Right now it's Apple vs. the labels keeping prices in check. When the labels induce Amazon's success, it will be the consumers against the labels directly... and we know who will win then.

But the point is a backup would have been useless

[SuperKendall]

Nonetheless, it's always a good idea to backup your favorite music, regardless of the format in which it was purchased.

No it's not.

Not in this case.

For you see, when he went to re-load the backed up music it would re-contact the Walmart DRM server looking for authorization... A server which no longer exists.

Re:But the point is a backup would have been usele

[astrosmash]

It's not rocket science. It's only audio, and it's very easy to work with.

There are plenty of ways to backup that don't involve DRM, but it really won't matter until there is a mass of people who want to remove the DRM from their purchased music. Of course, if there was a mass of people using Wal-Mart's music service they wouldn't have shut it down in the first place.

Re:WTF

[WTF Chuck]

The DRM services will be just as liable as soon as the DRM'd media starts causing peoples computers and MP3 players to catch fire.