DRM: another one bites the dust
Some five months ago, I wrote a post about DRM and the end of free will in which I wrote:
Also, when the companies who dictate how you can use their product all of a sudden decide to make the rules a bit stricter, then you might end up owning a worthless collection. A DRM-protected product can be disabled at any time by the producer if he believes that we violate the terms of the agreement. This would indeed mean that your collection of “protected” music can be rendered useless (e.g. by decreasing the quality or even deleting the content) in a matter of seconds, without your approval.
Guess what: Wal*Mart is pulling the plug on their music Digital Rights Management (DRM) Server. This means that in two weeks’ time, anyone who ever bought music from Wal*Mart will be stuck with music they can only play on the computer they used to authenticate with when they paid for the right to listen to the music.
I guess we should have seen it coming. The people at Apple probably did, too, a while ago, when they decided to just cut a deal with EMI and offer EMI’s music DRM-free via iTunes. Who’s next?
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