October 10th, 2008
Wal-Mart Reverses Course; Will Maintain DRM Servers
By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews
I wondered earlier how long it would take for Wal-Mart to decide that shutting down the DRM servers for its music store was a bad PR move. After all, both Microsoft and Yahoo! tried the same thing, and eventually changed their minds.
The answer is: about two weeks.
On Thursday Wal-Mart announced that they goofed. Well, actually, they started sending emails out to the same people they had emailed earlier — when they told them they were ditching the servers:
From: Walmart Digital Music
Date: October 9, 2008 11:03:39 PM CDT
Subject: UPDATE: Important Information About Your Digital Music PurchasesNOTE: This is a follow-up to our email titled “Important Information About Your Digital Music Purchases” from 9/26/08.
Based on feedback from our customers, we have decided to maintain our digital rights management (DRM) servers for the present time. What this means to you is that our existing service continues and there is no action required on your part. Our customer service team will continue to assist with DRM issues for protected windows media audio (WMA) files purchased from Walmart.com.
While our customer support team is available to assist you with any issues, we continue to recommend that you back up your songs by burning them to a recordable audio CD. By backing up your songs, you insure access to them from any personal computer at any time in the future.
We appreciate your support and patience as we work to provide the best service possible to you. As we move forward with our 100% MP3 store, we’ll continue to update you with key decisions regarding our service and your account via email.
Thank you for using Walmart MP3 Music Downloads.
The Walmart Digital Music Team
As I previously said, this is just another example of why DRM is bad. Of course, the majority of music sold by the iTunes Store is DRM, but I don’t see any way that Apple is going anywhere, so those DRM servers will be there for as long as you can imagine. Doesn’t make it (DRM) right, but …
Kevin K. says:
Any software or content that is perpetually locked to a server that has the potential to disappear in the future is a rotten deal no matter whether it has DRM or not.
I can think of several that do or will break one day including:
ACDSee (version 6 or 7 started to require “activation” and always tries to phone home every time you start them - that’s when I stopped buying updates to the program.) I can fake it out by shutting off my network connection before starting the program but it takes longer to start up. Very annoying. I stopped using it and went back to an earlier version that does not need this useless check.
Musicmatch Jukebox (now Yahoo) that always checked the server for your license and now breaks since MMJB is gone in favor of Yahoo Jukebox. I can no longer use functionality I paid for because the MMJB servers are no longer reachable. Of course I could use Yahoo Jukebox but the only way to use the full functionality is to LOG IN to my Yahoo account. Otherwise, the software is crippled. I did NOT buy a subscription but that’s how they treat it now.
Adobe Acrobat Professional (7.x for me) you need to activate to use it so, when you install it on a new computer, you can’t use it until it’s activated. Well, now that they have moved on to newer versions, what’s stopping them from canceling the ability to activate the older versions and force you to buy a newer version?
Etc.
Phoning home be it for a DRM key or activation or simple use is reprehensible in my opinion.
October 13th, 2008 at 7:34 am
Tim says:
How hard would it be to program those DRM servers to, once they’ve verified your digital rights, start up a download dialogue for the very same song in DRM-free format? That would be the best in terms of customer service and PR
October 14th, 2008 at 7:45 am