Wal-Mart's DRM Nightmare Just Won't End

by Volker Weber

An e-mail sent to Wal-Mart digital music store customers said the company will continue to support the DRM-ed song files sold on walmart.com starting in 2003. The e-mail reversed last month's announcement that Wal-Mart would shut down the servers that authenticate the copyright protected music it no longer sells. Unfortunately, doing so would render all protected music purchased from the store in the past five years unplayable. ...

After e-mailers and commentators explained to Wal-Mart how much harm shutting down its DRM authentication servers would cause its customers, the company backpedaled, and will keep its DRM servers running -- for now anyway. In addition, it will continue to employ support staff with the unenviable chore of helping Wal-Mart customers navigate the rocky landscape of Microsoft's aging PlaysForSure DRM, which Microsoft won't even use in its own store.

For Wal-Mart -- a company obsessed with keeping costs down -- the price of keeping Microsoft's aging DRM system on life support will be a sour reminder of why copyright protection on individual song downloads was such a bad idea in the first place. At least the company has learned its lesson and is abandoning music DRM entirely.

Repeat after me: DRM is bad for the customer.

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Comments

… not too hot for the vendor in this case either!

Ben Poole, 2008-10-13

What's bad for the customer is also bad for the vendor. You can fool them only so long.

Volker Weber, 2008-10-13

just buy my CDs....
No copy-protection /DRM what so ever.
Change your system, stay with my CDs ;-)
As simple as that!

Take care!
Heiko

Heiko Müller, 2008-10-14

Old vowe.net archive pages

I explain difficult concepts in simple ways. For free, and for money. Clue procurement and bullshit detection.

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