Righting digital wrongs
| Monday, July 28th, 2008 | --Sean |
Yahoo! Music Unlimited is finally shuttering the windows and locking up the doors, making way for the mass exodus over to Rhapsody's greener (financially?) pastures. While I'll miss Y!MU terribly, there are some perks -- we keep the same subscription price for the first year if we follow the official account migration, Rhapsody has a larger catalog and offers MP3 downloads, and I've heard good things about the Rhapsody player and the overall experience. I haven't made the switch yet, but I'm optimistic about it (aside from the increased price, but again, I'll have a year over which to evaluate whether it's worth it).
One unfortunate side effect of shutting down that branch of Yahoo! Music is that they would need to close down the licensing servers as well, meaning that any DRM-laden music files that you had purchased through Y!MU would become unplayable once your system settings changed enough to invalidate the license. Sure, you could burn the songs to a CD and rip them back, but it's a hassle, sound quality suffers, etc. This is why DRM is a terrible, terrible thing and I'm overjoyed that we're getting out of that business, but having us "brick" music that you had rightfully purchased is significantly less joy-inducing.
Obviously, that's not the cool thing. The cool thing is that the Yahoo! Music folk changed their mind. After hearing pretty significant public outcry over the prospect of entire music libraries being silenced, they re-evaluated their decision and offered up the following solutions:
- Full refunds on any purchased songs that would have died due to DRM.
- Investigation into replacing DRM-"protected" songs with glorious MP3s if desired.
Those are good options for the consumer, even if my first thought was, "Wow, that's gonna cost the company." Heck, it's even more impressive given that thought. So even though we had a misstep out of the gates, I'm proud that Yahoo! Music ended up putting back some of the "right" that's been missing from "digital rights management".