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."
Wal-Mart (Score:5, Insightful)
Only did this so that people wouldn't sue them.
Re:Wal-Mart (Score:5, Insightful)
this because of "feedback from the customers."
Only did this so that people wouldn't sue them.
You say tomato, I say fruit. Whatever.
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Whatever else you might want to say about Walmart, you at
least have to give them credit for being good at pandering
to their customers. That says as much about the Walmart
shopper as it does Walmart, but that's another rant...
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Or this evil plan...
Think about closing the servers .. Save X per months. Cost of the future lawsuits, evaluate to something maybe greater than X, maybe smaller. Add in the bad publicity about closing them and the lawsuit, total losses are greater than the inital X.
Then wonder, what if we'd announce we'd close them, and shortly after get good free publicity about us catering to our users ? So we keep paying for X, but we get 5 * X in return just in the first month!
Anyway =)
Re:Wal-Mart (Score:5, Funny)
Tagged: suddenoutbreakoflawsuits
Re:Wal-Mart (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wal-Mart (Score:5, Insightful)
What's your point? Walmart was looking out for their bottom line? You don't really think Walmart is in business because they get warm fuzzy feelings selling cheap shit to cheap people, do you? A lawsuit would have been an expensive waste of time for everybody involved, and they almost certainly would have lost. It was clearly in Walmart's best interest to avoid it.
That's the way it's supposed to work.
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You know, I need to start manufacturing things with built-in self destruct switches and simply blow up my customers purchases when I need more sales. =)
Re:Wal-Mart (Score:5, Funny)
If these are in the form of a 'vest'....I think you'll find a ready made market over there in the middle east. Heck....make it voice activated:
LaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLa....BOOM!
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A better trigger word would be "nukular"
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I need to start manufacturing things with built-in self destruct switches and simply blow up my customers purchases when I need more sales. =)
Microsoft got the patent on that ages ago.
-
Re:Wal-Mart (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wal-Mart (Score:4, Funny)
Ever bought a toaster outside of the US. You'll burn you hand the first time you use it. Not in America. The only toasters you find will be more carefully designed and labeled
Would this label say "do not insert hand into toaster while in operation?". Yeesh..
There is a big difference between "outside of the US" and "South Africa". Please stop making such crazy generalisations. I don't think I've ever burned my hand on a toaster..
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Might it have something to do with you knowing that it is hot, i.e. using your common sense? I will probably be modded flamebait, bit it seems to me that most people in the US of A simply have lost their common sense. While having non-hot toasters, do you also wait with getting the bread from it? Because, you know, it might be hot and you can feel a burning sensation? Well if you do, the obvious choice is of course to sue the maker of the toaster!
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Ye gods, toasters are HOT? We must warn the world! Who knew? Quick, get me my label making kit.. you know - the one with the highly flammable glue?
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Re:Wal-Mart (Score:5, Insightful)
Horse shit. Walmart spends more on toilet paper for their in-store restrooms in a month than a lawsuit over this would have cost them. 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".
It probably really was customer feedback and the fact that this was making Walmart look bad. Bad press is far more damaging than some piddly ol' nickel and dime lawsuit.
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.
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Walmart spends more on toilet paper for their in-store restrooms in a month than a lawsuit over this would have cost them.
If you sue for the same sorts of "losses" that the RIAA sues for, then that $100,000+ per track would add up pretty fast.
Even with miserable total sales of 10,000 tracks, that'd be a billion dollar lawsuit.
Presumably... (Score:5, Insightful)
... they have a list of who bought which track. Wouldn't it be simpler to just send them non-DRMed copies of things they've already bought? At the very least, they could offer a discount for people re-buying tracks in a non-DRMed format.
Re:Presumably... (Score:5, Interesting)
They do not have the rights to take such actions as you propose. Only Apple/iTunes was smart enough to get that written into their contract.
Re:Presumably... (Score:4, Interesting)
Do it anyway. It would be fun watching tiny RIAA try to sue billion-dollar Walmart.
In my view all Walmart would be doing is simply trading "broken items" with new working items. Just like trading a broken radio for a working radio. That's called good customer service, and Walmart would gain far more money from their happy customers, then they'd lose against a mosquito like RIAA.
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.
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>>>Walmart employees can get disciplined for working during their breaks now...
Most stores have had that restriction for years. I got disciplined for working my break at JCPenney, and that was back in 1992! Don't blame the store; it's the government's fault that things are that way. The stores are merely trying to protect themselves form government punishment.
Back to topic:
- If Walmart sold DRM songs, and Walmart turns-off the DRM servers, those songs would be non-functional.
- Walmart has an *ob
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Most stores have had that restriction for years. I got disciplined for working my break at JCPenney, and that was back in 1992! Don't blame the store; it's the government's fault that things are that way. The stores are merely trying to protect themselves form government punishment.
Are you implying that this shouldn't be the case?
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That person could help you, if walmart was willing to pay them, they aren't.
Walmart can't pay employees to work through breaks except in emergencies. They're not allowed to.
This has nothing to do with overtime, it's a health-and-safety issue.
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Offering to make a CD backup of the collection of any user who complains might be doable, though.
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Apple doesn't really do that, you just get the privilege of paying a discounted price for the non-DRM version of the songs you already own.
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:Presumably... (Score:5, Informative)
the cheapest short term solution to keep their customers happy is just to leave the DRM servers up.
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Even if walmart has to pay the record companies out of its own pocket, what's the break even point? You pay for a bunch of MP3s once or you pay to maintain servers forever. At some people, the MP3 option becomes cheaper.
LK
Re:Presumably... (Score:5, Insightful)
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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 usab
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1) Sell DRM'd tracks to unsuspecting customers.
2) Switch off servers forcing customers to violate the DMCA to use what they've paid for.
3) Sue the infringing bastards.
4) PROFIT!!!
Feels like a Scooby-Doo ending. (Score:2, Insightful)
"I would have gotten away with it, if it wasn't for you meddling kids!"
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Feels like a Scooby-Doo ending. (Score:5, Insightful)
All this means is that they will wait another year or maybe two before shutting down the DRM servers. They will in the end, there is no doubt.
Do you seriously think the DRM servers will be running in 20 years? No way.
While I'm in agreement, Walmart could certainly use that year or two in order to attempt to convince the labels to allow Walmart to remove the DRM from users' purchases. I think it'd be in their interest: they'd be able to shut down the DRM servers, they wouldn't take a big PR hit, and this episode would be much less likely to affect future music sales. Walmart is certainly willing to use their leverage to squeeze suppliers, and they probably have enough leverage with the labels to at least give it a try.
Would they get anywhere? Hell if I know.
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The sooner they turn the servers off, the better. The public needs to learn that DRM means that they don't own copies of the media, despite what marketing would have them think.
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I think there is a lesson in this to the companies that sell DRM crap that depends on servers. It's a one-time purchase with a recurring cost to the seller. Ultimately, DRM is a losing proposition to the retailer - if you run the DRM servers long enough, you *will* lose money.
It's basically a ponzi scheme - to cover the cost of running the DRM servers, you have to keep finding new sales to prop up the running expenses on the old sales. Eventually you run out of new sales and you lose money.
The incrementa
Right. (Score:2)
Fixed that for you.
"Feedback" as in ... (Score:2)
Heh. That's "feedback" as in "loud screeching noise which can destroy the system if it gets out of control"?
Now if only Sony and Nokia would realise that DRM is deeply despised and that marketing your stuff as "DRM-free" when it patently isn't [today.com] is not a solution to this ... ah, the joys of major label control addiction. As Penn Jilette says: "I would make executives more concerned with making money. I'm serious." [ign.com]
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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 dem
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See, I'd actually question that - in observable behaviour, they seem to consider absolute control a prerequisite to making money at all. So even though they may think they're thinking about money, control is what they actually work for.
Re:"Feedback" as in ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The discussion gets circular at some point, they are working for control because they think that will get them more money.
A buzzphrase that may or may not still be vocalized by executives is 'data driven decisions'. In practice a good many decision are still made according to gut feelings, or very thin data, or totally invented data. In part this is because getting good data is hard to do and even harder to find clear meaning in.
Here at Slashdot you have a demographic that should be more math oriented than most and yet you have people, this thread is a good example, writing about the financial and legal consequences of the Wal-Mart Corporation running or not running DRM servers. This is without a day's legal education in their lives and with no more financial experience than balancing their own checkbook. And with no clear actual numbers on which to base any of their conclusions.
So just like the above Slashdotters, music execs went with their gut feelings. They expected digital formats to work like every other format in the entire history of their business model. I don't blame them. All of the non-DRM music stores coming online seems to suggest their minds are changing. If these stores make for the music industry I'm sure DRM for music will be mostly abandoned.
Did this really honestly surprise anyone? (Score:2)
Sure, you could have held out hope that Wal-Mart would do the right thing.
But did you really expect them to?
Come on folks chime in. Did the fact that they caved really come across your desk as news that caught you off guard?
If it did, I got this bridges and some wonderful swamp land in FLA I am selling cheap.
DMCA exemption (Score:5, Interesting)
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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
The real price of DRM (Score:5, Interesting)
For consumers, living in constant doubt of their content. For providers, servers that they will have to run, like, forever. And the admins who maintain them.
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From the provider's standpoint, it's not so hard. Future expenses are always factored into every sale in one way or another, but as a net present value.
The NPV of maintaining the servers forever is, in fact, finite, although the total expenditure over time has no upper bound.
What should give anybody pause when buying a piece of DRM'd music is whether the true cost of maintaining the infrastructure behind the DRM indefinitely is factored into the cost.
Heh.. (Score:2)
There was a Moes restaurant we used to go to that had a 25% military discount that they took away due to "popular demand." In Alabama, no less.
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It's pretty easy to imagine that a restaurant that openly has a policy of "33% surcharge if you're not in the military," would receive a lot of complaints. Most people aren't in the military, so the people in favor of the discrimination would be outnumbered by the people against it.
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Such is the human condition, I guess. People are more interested in dicking people over that are more fortunate than them than improving their own situation. Go to a bar with a shuffleboard table, and you'll see everyone is more interested in knocking the other guy's puck thing off than scoring points for himself.
retarded walmart hate (Score:3, Insightful)
someone are just plains stupid i guess.
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They should have done the right thing the first time, without getting yelled at. They got caught doing something stupid, and had to take their hand back out of the cookie jar. It would have been better if we didn't have to beat them into doing the right thing.
virtualization hole (Score:3, Insightful)
Apologies for marginally off topic, but couldn't I write an 'audio driver' for Xen, Bochs, .... which took the samples intended for the sound card and store them to a file; un-drming anything? Same for DVDs? Where does this stand with DMCA? I'm not reverse engineering anything....
Mix, Burn, Rip (Score:2)
If they allow burning to audio CD, you don't even have to do that. Just follow Apple's advice and "Mix, Burn, Rip" the DRM out of it. You'll end up with the same "bits" on disc.
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Burning the CD converts those bits into an analogue waveform
No, it doesn't. Compact discs are digital. The result of capturing the digital audio stream (using a tool like Audio Hijack) and ripping a burned CD should be equivalent. Neither operation is the same as somehow stripping the DRM from the original compressed stream without decompressing it, but that isn't what the OP was suggesting.
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There is no such thing as a digital physical item. Nature is analog.
You're being pointlessly pedantic here. The same objections hold true for the copy of the file on your hard disk, in memory, downloaded from the iTunes store, it's all digital not because it's made of some magical digital element, but because the operations performed on it are quantized, ignoring the relative levels and timing of the signal outside the limits of that process.
If you write an audio CD and immediately read it back again, and y
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> Burning the CD converts those bits into an analogue waveform,
I think this depends on how you do the rip and burn.
If you rip by sending the audio through the D-to-A converter, then resample it back to digital through the A-to-D converter on your audio hardware before burning the CD, then yes you've made an unnecessary analog conversion.
But most rip-and-burn software isn't going to do that, because that would be silly.
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I believe QEMU (and probably Bochs) already has that option. For QEMU there is also a monitor command named "wavcapture" for this purpose. As for the DMCA, it mentions "circumvention", not reverse engineering, although the option to save audio to a file may have enough alternative uses to avoid being classified as a circumvention device.
(Not a lawyer, etc., etc. Insert standard disclaimer here.)
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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.
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Isn't this capability already available?
I know that on my Windows box, I can use Audacity (fr'instance) to record the "stereo mix" input while some other application is playing whatever I'm listening to, DRM'd or not.
The ability to do this probably depends on whether the audio hardware allows this, though.
Also, this does add an extra decompression-recompression step that degrades the quality a little. Not that I can tell any difference, though. The virtual audio driver option would do the same.
Now, if we can get off Windows (Score:4, Insightful)
Hopefully they can pull their web developers' collective head out of their collective ass and make a web store that works on something other than internet explorer and windows.
Seriously, is this 1995 or something?
Back to the future... (Score:2)
Seriously, is this 1995 or something?
It's Walmart. They think it's still 1895.
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Hopefully they can pull their web developers' collective head out of their collective ass and make a web store that works on something other than internet explorer and windows.
This is precisely why Apple created both the iPod and the iTunes Store in the first place, and why Apple isn't concerned with turning a profit on the iTunes Store (as long as they break even). They wanted a portable MP3 player that would work with Macs, and they wanted digital music sales to be available for Macs and the iPod.
Unfortunately Apple doesn't think it's in their best interest to support Linux, although this is mostly due to technical hurdles (porting QuickTime to Windows was a huge pain in the a
Whoops! (Score:5, Insightful)
Now *this* is good news.
Why? Because you can bet that Wallmart execs are not at all happy about having to pay for and run a bunch of servers that are no longer making them any money. You can bet that just opened their eyes to the downsides of DRM, and that some people at the top are now asking the music labels some tricky questions, namely "how long are we supposed to keep paying to run these damn things now?".
Wallmart will not want to be left in this position again, and I can see this causing them to put some real pressure on the music labels to drop DRM.
It also means that Wallmart, Apple and Amazon are all pushing for non DRM music. All together that's some pretty hefty leverage!
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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.)
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I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but...
Taken from the iTunes Store Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org]:
Too Bad (Score:2)
I wanted these servers to shut down. I wanted all these people who bought DRM'd music to be left out in the cold. I wanted there to be outrage at how they got screwed by WalMart and DRM.
Only when the end users feel the pain of DRM will there be real resistance to this crap.
Feedback from Walmart Customers (Score:2)
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They should just (Score:2)
Turn off the DRM server but also offer free non-DRM'd replacements for download from their website for all DRM'd files a user has purchased.
What's shocking (Score:2, Troll)
What's shocking is that people actually used Wal-Mart's crappy, censored, DRM filled, and buggy service in the first place. Who are these people? Where do they live? And can we somehow take away their right vote?
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"And can we somehow take away their right vote?"
No. I'll bet that primarily they vote (D) and not (R). You must be an (R) to try to restrict voting like that.
Re:HUH?? (Score:5, Funny)
Turn off the DRM servers, transfer the file to another machine and listen to it again.
Listen to the windows error message sound.
Which sounds better?
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] ;)
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1. You have no clue what you are talking about. The DRM servers being kept up means the shitty DRM music still plays instead of customers being locked out. Not continuing DRM. Wal-mart might not be able to get rid of the DRM even if they wanted to because of contractual obligations...
2. Wal-mart was made to make people money, not to operate as a charity, especially a music charity. They don't have to give a rat's ass about the customers any more than you have to give a rat's ass about the guy that pic
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Walmart should have offered to strip any files and then stop using DRM.
Ummm, they are. It's even stated in this (and previous) articles. And the above summary.
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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.
Off-topic political game theory (Score:2)
Sig reply (sorry for being OT)
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
Suppose there are three candidates, A, B and C. Your payoff for the candidates are A=+10, B=-1, C=-1000. If you vote for B or C, your candidate wins [and you get their respective payoffs]. If you vote for A, then C wins. Your options are -1 or -1000. Clearly the best one is -1.
It's a somewhat simplified model of reality, but it applies well enough to give some insight. If you want to add depth, you might say that A wins with some very small base probability, and your vote
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Which is one reason that proportional representation is a good thing, or a mixed system like the one Ontario tried to move to last year.
In addition, usually the pluses and minuses will not be so greatly varied; often A will be +1000, in which case statistically it may be slightly better to vote for B, but that's assuming that A will never win and that voting for B will guarantee a win for them, which are two huge assumptions to be making.
But yeah, we agree that the system needs some definite changes so peop
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Your weights skew things.
What if A is +10, B is -10,000 and C is -10,001?
B and C are close enough that the choice is pretty irrelevant. Also there needs to be some sort of formula to take into account that third parties (indeed the idea of third parties, as much as any one in particular) have an associated snowball effect. The more people vote for a third option, the more people think that it might just work...
But yeah, electoral reform is the real answer.
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I'm so pissed here in ontario proportional representation failed. WTF is wrong with voters? 'we want our votes to mean less and have broken minority government forever.'
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People weren't educated enough, and because of that, pride in our system and the belief that "nothing could be wrong with democracy" won out. I think a lot of people who didn't know any better saw it as a weird radical idea from some unknown party that would mess with the system, rather than fix issues they didn't know about.
It's definitely unfortunate, and I really hope they're able to bring it back to another vote and further educate people as to what it would actually mean.
Re:Feedback ... (Score:5, Insightful)
They'll just quietly try it again in a year. Mark my words.
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Oh...they will most certainly shut it off at some point. I mean..since that program is no longer earning money for them, this is just a cost for server, power and man hours to maintain it. This will not run in perpetuity...it will get shut off at some point in the future. Hey, if you bought DRM music, this is a possibility you should have considered.
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The good thing is that this will be a great example to smaller organisations (basically.. everyone) that DRM is a waste of money for the proprietors as well as a PITA for clients.
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That's exactly what it was. Nefarious and walmart go hand in hand.