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Boing Boing | Yahoo Music shutting down its DRM server, customers lose all their paid-for music the next time they crash or upgrade

"All those years the music industry spent insisting that the only way they'd sell music is with crippling DRM attached managed to totally discredit the idea of buying music at all."

Techdirt | Did Yahoo Not Pay Attention To What Happened When Microsoft Pulled The Plug On Its DRM Server?

could [Yahoo] seriously not have noticed the massive backlash that Microsoft received for telling people that it was turning off its DRM servers, effectively locking all the songs people had "bought" to their current computers.

I thought I'd written about it a little while back when Microsoft decided that the servers that check to see if the music you've "purchased" from Microsoft's music store is legal or not were no longer necessary. That meant that all the music you thought you "bought" from Microsoft was really just being rented, and now they'd decided to terminate your lease because they didn't feel like complying with the deal they made with you anymore.

And now Yahoo is doing the same thing. All the music you "bought" from Yahoo won't work anymore if you move it to a different computer.

I've said this numerous times, and I'm not alone - if you pay for ANYTHING that has DRM attached, you are NOT buying. You are RENTING at the discretion of whoever is taking your money. Some people may be okay with that. I'm not.

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I don't understand why they

I don't understand why they don't just setup some dumb ping server that sends back TRUE when the DRM file tries to authenticate. This way at least people's files will survive. Do they have to hose everyone by taking the computers offline?

Yeah, I have no idea why it

Yeah, I have no idea why it has to be so complicated. They could probably even get some geek customer to do the entire thing himself, except that it would be a DMCA violation.

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