Slashdot Mirror
Walmart Caves On DRM Removal
cmunic8r99 writes in with an email he received from walmart.com yesterday evening about the pending shutdown of their DRM services (which we discussed a while back). Walmart has reconsidered and won't be shutting off its DRM servers after all. They are still moving to an all-MP3 store, but won't break all the DRMed music its customers have already downloaded; this because of "feedback from the customers."
The problem with that is that Walmart probably has a contract with record labels that they made when they started the DRM service, and reoffering nonDRMed files would either require breaking the contract which risks a lawsuit, making a new contract with the record labels to allow them to reoffer DRM tracks for free (which would cost walmart tons because there is no way record labels would be interested in letting that happen w/o being paid a second time).
the cheapest short term solution to keep their customers happy is just to leave the DRM servers up.
You're missing the point.
They might not want DRM, but they do want their previous purchased music to not suddenly become worthless.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Walmart spends more on toilet paper for their in-store restrooms in a month than a lawsuit over this would have cost them.
No, because they would have likely lost the lawsuit and the judge would have done one of two things:
1. Forced them to pay compensation to the people who bought the music.
2. Forced them to escrow money to keep the servers running.
Add in lawyer fees (plaintiff and defendant), and it is clear that they should just take #2 without the fight.
Plus I'd be willing to bet that there is fine print in the user agreement for all those DRMed tracks somewhere that says words to the effect of "we can turn it off any time with a few days notice and its your problem not ours".
I guarantee that is in there somewhere. But that doesn't make it enforceable.
It probably really was customer feedback and the fact that this was making Walmart look bad.
It was probably that, too. Not everything is black and white :) The added publicity from a lawsuit would have been detrimental as well.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I just looked at the legalese from 2006, and came up with the following:
Sound recordings, and audiovisual works associated with those sound recordings, distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require access to a central server as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or reproduction of published digital works by the original accessing entity. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine, system or service necessary to authorize the perceptible of a work stored in that format if a central server is no longer provided to authorize such perceptible./quote
Nothing for 6-digit uids?