Another victory for DRM...

[alexpgp]

According to an item at boingboing,

People who bought music from the MSN music store have been royally hosed by Microsoft: as of today, if you buy a new computer, or refresh your hard-drive, you have to kiss all your music goodbye. Microsoft has shut down its DRM "license server" and left people who bought music - instead of downloading it from a P2P site - out in the cold.

The shutdown will actually occur later this year, but the essence of the piece remains clear: once the servers are shut down, music bought from made available by MSN will only play for as long as you keep your old computer (and operating system).

Indeed, according to the article, the email sent out by MSN speaks about "songs you purchased from MSN Music." If only there were a way to DRM the money used to pay for such "purchased" wares, so that it would cease to be valid legal tender if the merchandise "bought" were to stop working.

A pox on them all.

Cheers...

Comments

[eastexpert.livejournal.com]

This is why an idea of *buying* a DRM-infected item of music from any of online shops has *never* occurred to me.

My worst nightmares about DRM seem to be true. I believe they *gotta* lose the DRM any time now. Blu-Ray will probably be the latest physical media, afterwards there probably will be the "economy of download". They will just mark in a certain database that you (ID: abcd-efgh-ijkl-mnop-qrst) have bought song X of band Y and have access to it forever from any point of Earth unlimited number of times.

That would be the *only* fair model: once bought, it's yours to download/copy to your car/MP3-OGG-WMA player - as long as you don't charge for performance.

Before then, BitTorrent is King, and fcuk teh DRM.

[vuzh.livejournal.com]

A pox on them all.

I've got to agree with you there!

Maybe we should put a license agreement on legal tender! :)