Walmart Caves On DRM Removal 215
cmunic8r99 writes in with an email he received from walmart.com yesterday evening about the pending shutdown of their DRM services (which we discussed a while back). Walmart has reconsidered and won't be shutting off its DRM servers after all. They are still moving to an all-MP3 store, but won't break all the DRMed music its customers have already downloaded; this because of "feedback from the customers."
Re:Presumably... (Score:5, Informative)
the cheapest short term solution to keep their customers happy is just to leave the DRM servers up.
Re:"Feedback" as in ... (Score:3, Informative)
Walmarts executives are very interested in making money. They want to sell music, and they aren't especially interested in running DRM servers. They will use whatever method they can to get as much popular music into the hands of paying customers as possible.
$MusicLabel executives on the other hand are also interested in making money. They (until quite recently) seemed to think the best method of doing this was demanding keeping a vicelike DRM grip on the balls of the end-consumer. Until recently they were giving companies that wanted to deliver non-DRM content what is known in business as "the finger".
So possibly a better thing to say would be "$MusicLabel execs need to take a look at the pulse *here* and their finger, which is *here* firmly jammed up their own arsehole." - ozphx [slashdot.org].
Re:HUH?? (Score:4, Informative)
Hey I'll have you know the windows error message sound was mastered by King Crimsons Robert Fripp! [msdn.com] ;)
Re:"feedback from the customers." (Score:5, Informative)
You're missing the point.
They might not want DRM, but they do want their previous purchased music to not suddenly become worthless.
Re:Rather than a tool (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Presumably... (Score:2, Informative)
I strongly suspect that within the temporal horizon Walmart considers, the cost of maintaining minimal authentication severs is absolutely minimal.
They have the hardware already (obviously), idem for the maintenance contracts, their only variable cost is bandwidth. At the very least, this will stop rising as nobody will be authorising new music.
I expect their authentication server's performance will gradually degrade as they cease spending money on maintenance and upgrades, but it will remain basically usable - avoiding them the lawsuits.
This, basically, accounts for the total of their NPV.
Walmart isn't judgement-proof... (Score:4, Informative)
There's been plenty of people who've sued Walmart, and won, even over smaller issues than beelyuns of imaginary dollars.
And Walmart's reactions AFTER the lawsuit are often completely disproportionate. Apparently, Walmart employees can get disciplined for working during their breaks now, because someone who had to work through their lunch break a bunch of times sued over it, and won. If you ask a Walmart employee for help and they say they're on break, and they can't, they really mean it.
Re:Wal-Mart (Score:5, Informative)
Walmart spends more on toilet paper for their in-store restrooms in a month than a lawsuit over this would have cost them.
No, because they would have likely lost the lawsuit and the judge would have done one of two things:
1. Forced them to pay compensation to the people who bought the music.
2. Forced them to escrow money to keep the servers running.
Add in lawyer fees (plaintiff and defendant), and it is clear that they should just take #2 without the fight.
Plus I'd be willing to bet that there is fine print in the user agreement for all those DRMed tracks somewhere that says words to the effect of "we can turn it off any time with a few days notice and its your problem not ours".
I guarantee that is in there somewhere. But that doesn't make it enforceable.
It probably really was customer feedback and the fact that this was making Walmart look bad.
It was probably that, too. Not everything is black and white :) The added publicity from a lawsuit would have been detrimental as well.
Re:Whoops! (Score:3, Informative)
I don't have a single DRM'd song from iTunes, though I've bought about half a dozen albums. (iTunes just doesn't carry much of what I like.)
Re:Whoops! (Score:3, Informative)
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but...
Taken from the iTunes Store Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org]:
Re:Wal-Mart (Score:1, Informative)
Ever bought a toaster outside of the US. You'll burn you hand the first time you use it.
The EU has strict standards for electrical equiptment like this and those standards are generally rigourously applied.
Re:Presumably... (Score:4, Informative)
Nope, check the EULA. They literally spell out your rights. If for any reason, their DRM system needs to be taken permanently offline, they will provide you with the tools to remove the DRM from your purchased media.
That said, I would never knowingly purchase any DRM'd content. It just defies all intelligence.
Re:virtualization hole (Score:2, Informative)
You are correct, and I'm fairly certain that is why all the protected output path technologies are coming into play, in order to preventexactly that. To actually take the dump, you would nee to decrypt something, at which point you have entered the realm of circumvention technologies.
Re:DMCA exemption (Score:5, Informative)
I just looked at the legalese from 2006, and came up with the following:
Sound recordings, and audiovisual works associated with those sound recordings, distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require access to a central server as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or reproduction of published digital works by the original accessing entity. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine, system or service necessary to authorize the perceptible of a work stored in that format if a central server is no longer provided to authorize such perceptible./quote