It's getting to be an old song. This week the Yahoo Music Store sent a message to customers saying they will turn off their DRM servers after September, thus joining MSN Music, Sony's Connect music store and other online music services in eventually cutting off customers who purchased DRM-wrapped tunes. And readers
It's getting to be an old song. This week the Yahoo Music Store sent a message to customers saying they will turn off their DRM servers after September, thus joining MSN Music, Sony's Connect music store and other online music services in eventually cutting off customers who purchased DRM-wrapped tunes. And readers have no doubt it's a song the movie, e-book, and software publishers are also going to be singing in the future.
"At least the music industry is starting to get the message that DRM doesn't really work," wrote one reader recently. "What scares me is all the different DRM initiatives pushed on the device manufacturers by the MPAA and TV industries. Half of those things have been forgotten even by the people who proposed them, but that doesn't mean the various attempts to implement them won't come back to bite us at some point. Heck, most of them are probably built into Vista."
Vendors who insist on using DRM have just been shooting themselves in the foot, say readers. "I used to occasionally buy a DRM tune from iTunes, but only because I knew I could copy it to CD if I wanted to," wrote another reader. "I'd have never bought a song from iTunes without that capability. But still, it was infrequent. Since iTunes Plus arrived, with its DRM-free high-quality content, I've purchased whole albums from iTunes, something I'd never have done had they been DRM (and 128 bit encoding). If a song doesn't say iTunes Plus on it now, I'll continue looking for something else that does."
"The real purpose of DRM is to lock the consumer into a company's product line," wrote another reader. "It is meant to extinguish the consumer's property right to first sale and fair use. For example, if you buy an MP3 track you should be able to play it on any device at any time. To restate this DRM issue in another way, copyright holder are aggrandizing their property rights by 'stealing' property from the consumer. Too bad our legal system does not recognize theft when it is done by corporations."
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