Wal-Mart Ends DRM Support

An anonymous reader writes "So, you thought you did well to support the fledgling music industry by purchasing your tracks legally from the Wal-Mart store? Well, forget about moving these tracks to a new PC! Since they started selling DRM-free tracks last year, there's no money to be made in maintaining the DRM support systems, and in fact, support is being shut down. Make sure you circumvent the restrictions by burning the tracks to an old-fashioned CD before Wal-mart 'will no longer be able to assist with digital rights management issues for protected WMA files purchased from Walmart.com.' Support ends October 9th."

refund

I don't know Wallyworld's terms of service, but are the customers within their rights to demand refunds?

Re:refund

They can demand all they want. Doesn't mean they will get it. Also this is yet another reason why DRM is evil. There is no money in continuing to maintain the DRM servers once you stop selling music. Once whoever you buy from decides to stop support, you are out of luck. This is the third service that I have heard of shutting down. I'm sure more will come in the future. I'm not sure how long it will take for people to realize just how bad DRM is.

Re:refund

They can demand all they want. Doesn't mean they will get it.

You ignored my question in favor of going on a rant.

Obviously, they have the right to say what they want. I was asking if their demands are supported by law. Perhaps under an implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for purpose. Also, the TOS could have terms relating directly to the shutdown of the service.

Re:refund

Except in California, where EULAs are on some very shaky legal ground.

EVERYTHING is on shaky ground in California http://quake.usgs.gov/recenteqs [usgs.gov]

Re:refund

I don't know Wallyworld's terms of service, but are the customers within their rights to demand refunds?

I suspect it depends on whether they use the term "purchase" anywhere on the eula or site...

Re:refund

So the moral of the story is that if you are willing to commit fraud you can get free cereal.

Re:refund

Sometimes in order to catch a thief, you have to use the tactics of a thief (deception, buying black market goods, and using weapons). Example: Dish Network sold me a digital tuner box which was so poorly-programmed, it barely worked. A few months later Dish released v1.06 with all the bugs removed, and since my warranty was still good, I asked to exchange boxes.

Dish refused saying they had no record of me as a customer. They lost the sale! Idiots. So since Dish effectively defrauded me, I decided to borrow a page from the same book. (1) I bought a brand-new revision v.106 box. (2) When the package arrived, I swapped the tuners and returned my defective v1.00 box. (3) I contacted my credit card company, explained the situation, and provided proof the item was returned to Dish. (4) The credit company reversed the charge. (5) It costs me about 5 dollars in postage, but at least now I have a working digital tuner.

Dish tried to scam me via selling a defective box, and failed. And now Walmart's trying to do the same thing; if necessary I would find a way to recover the money. Perhaps the credit card company could reverse the charge for this now-broken DRM and worthless Walmart music. If not there are other ways your credit card could help you recover the money you lost.

Re:refund

But three rights end up making a left!

Re:refund

Have to agree with this.

Walmart has very customer friendly return policies in their bricks-and-mortar stores.

The stores are pits, and the actual customer service sucks (I've stood at the pickup desk for a half hour just waiting for someone to show up and get my web order) but when you need to return something, they're very, very good about it.

Got some ugly crap for Christmas from your mother who, somehow, doesn't understand the concept of "gift receipts" and just says "if you don't like it, I got it at...." instead like it's still 1982?

If they can scan that particular piece of ugly crap and identify it as something they might have sold her, they'll give you back the current sale price on a gift card, so you can go buy juice and cereal. No hassles.

Target, on the other hand, are a bunch of bastards with crazy rules like "we'll take it, but you have to find something else to buy from the same department."

Re:refund

You can't really expect them to give you anything except what they're selling for without a receipt, can you? You could have bought it five minutes ago. If you'd had the receipt (or a gift receipt) and they'd given you $5 then I'd be mad.

Wish my mom would understand that.... we got $2 or something for a set of Christmas dishes that I'm sure she paid $20 for.

Re:refund

Baby stuff is very frequently shoplifted; low-income people have kids (lots!) that soil themselves as often as rich people's kids do, and they don't like cloth nappies any more than you do. So even though it doesn't make "sense", they had no idea what the providence of your diapers were; you could have bought them stolen for 20 cents on the dollar.

How hard was it to show them a driver's license, anyway?

A change.

An interesting change in the wind. Suddenly, DRM is not just bad for consumers but good for re-sellers, where the cost of pissing off your clientele has to be weighed vs the cost of producing DRM-laden product, but aside from being utterly useless it actually harms the company directly by costing it money.

This is something that companies will listen to- and quickly. I suspect that this begins the downward spiral of heavy-handed DRM.

At least, I hope so...

HAHAHA tag?

A lot of people said it, long ago. DRM won't work for this very reason (and many others) and now those who were legal, and honest, and bought DRM'd content have to suffer AGAIN. It's not just Wal-Mart, how many other content providers also shut down, or screwed their customers by dropping or changing the DRM.

Me? I'm still sitting back, waiting for the industry to calm down and pull their heads out. Punishing the customer won't stop the criminals, never will. Now that the US Dollar is about to be worth ... next to nothing, they will have to kiss customer's asses to get them to spend money. We'll see how this all plays out. Even the DOJ doesn't like the **AA's game plan. It's falling apart on them. Wal-Mart is NOT a small retailer. This is a large nail in the coffin that DRM will be put to rest in.

Re:HAHAHA tag?

Anyone with ideas on how to educate the general population [on DRM]?

Shut down the Wal-Mart DRM servers.

Almost had to re-buy all of their music...

My sister (who is obsessed with music) bought hundreds of dollars worth of music from Wal-Mart's music downloading service. Recently, her MP3 player started acting strange and refused to play any DRM songs, so I had to reformat the whole MP3 player and resync all of her music to it. (There was also serious filesystem corruption)

If Wal-Mart had ended their DRM support yesterday...

Vote of no confidence

DRM cannot be trusted. DRM retailers cannot be trusted to keep up the support. This is why people should never buy DRM.

Unexpected

Having purchased a DRM track from Wal-Mart a long time ago to try out the service, I received an e-mail recently from them about the service shutdown. Interestingly enough, they provided this advice to users:

If you have purchased protected WMA music files from our site prior to Feb 2008, we strongly recommend that you back up your songs by burning them to a recordable audio CD. By backing up your songs, you will be able to access them from any personal computer.

I didn't expect them to okay users to resort to the analog-hole, something that many companies and legislators have been trying to stop for years. Will other DRM services be this forgiving when they shut down their servers?

DRM Escrow

Companies that sell or license products with the built in DRM time bomb should have to put the keys to that product into a software escrow. The escrow acts as a kind of insurance against the company going out of business or to discontinue the service. This approach has been used by large companies for years to ensure the source code for the expensive new core system they bought from a start up would be around if the start up should fail. This will probably take some kind of government regulation to make it happen because individual consumers are too small to push this through. Anyone want to start such a service? It would probably just involve parking some servers in a data center with 2 or 3 spares in the box and maintaining them for 20 years. We can call it The National Museum of DRM Failure.

Why not replace the DRM'ed songs with non-DRM'ed?

I don't understand why they don't do the obvious--replace all customers' DRM'ed songs with the equivalent non-DRM'ed copy. Customers have their same tracks, WallyWorld doesn't have to maintain their DRM servers.

Oh, wait....the RIAA won't get to double-dip customers if that happens. Now I see.

And EA wonders...

...why we have a problem with their newest DRM model.

(Yes, I'm aware they claim they'll release a patch before they turn off the servers, but if they go bankrupt tomorrow and can't PAY anyone to develop said patch, then what?)

Another one bites the dust

Why isn't there a tracker page at Defective By Design [defectivebydesign.org] for how many of these DRM services have died? Google's video, Yahoo's music service, MSN Music, MTV, MLB.tv, CSS, etc?

support isn't free

This is just an expected downfall to DRM. Why sell something you'd have to continue supporting when you could just sell something with little or no support such as DRM-free music? It's for the better. Every time I hear those three letters I roll my eyes.

Re:DRM is dead

DRM Collector: Bring out yer dead.
Wal-Mart: Here's one.
DRM Collector: That'll be seventy-nine cents.
DRM'ed WMA File: I'm not dead.
DRM Collector: What?
Wal-Mart: Nothing. There's your seventy-nine cents.
DRM'ed WMA File: I'm not dead!
DRM Collector: 'Ere, he says he's not dead.
Wal-Mart: Yes he is.
DRM'ed WMA File: I'm not!
DRM Collector: He isn't.
Wal-Mart: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.
DRM'ed WMA File: I'm getting better.
Wal-Mart: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment.
DRM Collector: Well, I can't take him like that. It's against regulations.
DRM'ed WMA File: I don't want to go on the cart.
Wal-Mart: Oh, don't be such a baby.
DRM Collector: I can't take him.
DRM'ed WMA File: I feel fine.
Wal-Mart: Oh, do me a favor.
The Dead Collector: I can't.
Wal-Mart: Well, can you hang around for a couple of minutes? He won't be long.
DRM Collector: I promised I'd be at the Robinsons'. They've lost nine thousand music files today.
Wal-Mart: Well, when's your next round?
DRM Collector: Thursday.
DRM'ed WMA File: I think I'll go for a walk.
Wal-Mart: You're not fooling anyone, you know. Isn't there anything you could do?
DRM'ed WMA File: I feel happy! I feel happy!
[the DRM Collector glances up and down the street furtively, then silences the DRM'ed WMA File with his a whack of his club]
Wal-Mart: Ah, thank you very much.
DRM Collector: Not at all. See you on Thursday.
Wal-Mart: Right.

Re:DRM is dead

I only bumped into FairPlay two times.

The first is when I tried to move a DRM'ed AAC file to an old Win98SE laptop (so I simply went and got the same tune as an MP3 file from P2P, since I had already paid for the tune).

The second is when I tried to play a rented movie from another computer. Turns out, you can't watch the movie from another computer, it has to be on the one you rented the movie from (even if the other computer is in your list of 5 allowed computers). I could have moved the movie to my AppleTV or my iPod touch, but I needed to watch it on my laptop. It's annoying that rented movies don't have the same limitations as purchased ones.

Re:DRM is dead

While I agree that fairplay is likely to be around for a fair while yet, it isn't all that structurally different from the DRM used in this case. Subscription service WMDRM phones home frequently, so a shutdown of the activation servers will actively hose you within 30 days or so; but ordinary "purchased" WMDRM tracks are playable for the life of activated machines, as with fairplay. If fairplay activation servers went down, you'd be exactly as hosed as the people in TFA(which is to say, as soon as you need to activate a new device).