Sorry, MSN Music "Buyers!"

[louv68]

This may be old news to some of you as it came out yesterday.

http://blogs.pcworld.com/techlog/archives/006849.html

Copy & Paste of above link:
As I've said before, I don't have any religious opposition to the very notion of Digital Rights Management. But boy, does DRM in the real world keep turning out to be a compelling argument for the elimination of DRM, period.

I'm thinking of today's news that folks who "bought" songs on MSN Music won't be able to move them to new PCs after August. That's because Microsoft, which shut down MSN Music's "buy song" option when it launched the Zune in 2006, is deactivating the DRM servers that would allow a new PC to become an authorized device for music playback.

In this interview over at News.com, Microsoft exec Rob Bennett justifies the company's decision, saying that making the DRM work properly with operating-system upgrades was impractical. It's a shame that thecompany discovered that DRM was tough after marketing its DRM under the name PlaysForSure, a boast that was disproved again and again. ("PlaysForSure" has since morphed into the less sweeping-sounding "Certified For Windows Vista.")

So the upshot is that anyone who purchased tracks from MSN Music didn't really buy them in the traditional sense that you'd buy, oh, a CD. Microsoft's server shutdown means that the songs will be forever tied to the computers they're authorized for as of June.

The situation is pretty similar to what happened with Google Video last August, when the company stopped selling video downloads. After some squawking by consumers, Google ended up both giving customers their money back and providing an additional Google Coupon credit. I haven't seen any word on what if anything Microsoft plans to do for MSN Music customers who feel like their time and money was wasted.

Both Microsoft and Google are, ahem, rather large companies that aren't short on money or resources. And both cheerfully took consumers' money for content that those people were allegedly buying, and then decided that maintaining the DRM that made that content usable was inconvenient. It makes me glad that I've bought most of my music on CDs, where it's safe and sound from any business decisions made after the fact by the companies I bought the discs from. (A high percentage of my CDs came from Tower Records; it doesn't even exist anymore, and my music still plays just fine.)

Both the Microsoft and Google DRM decisions leave me just a little less likely to believe any claims those companies make when they're trying to part me from my money--and a whole lot more distrustful of DRM in any flavor.

If content wasn't locked up with DRM, of course, none of this would happen. Coincidentally, I've been visiting Microsoft in Redmond over the past couple of days, and I met today with Brian Seitz, senior marketing communications manager for Zune, the music device and platform that essentially replaced MSN Music. He told me that about two-thirds of the 3.5 million or so songs available on the Zune Marketplace are now available in DRM-free MP3 form--and that the company's goal is for all of its catalog to be available without DRM by the end of the year.

Sounds good to me. Perhaps Microsoft might like to give all those folks who purchased MSN Music tracks free versions of those songs in MP3 format?

[mats.hogberg]

Not Video news.

/Mats

[Krispy Kritter]

All of those users have until the deadline to move and/or convert those files.

[louv68]

Not Video news.

/Mats

True. I decided to share this not for the music portion, but rather to show the idiocy of DRM.