Wal*Mart will be shutting down their DRM servers on October 9th, giving customers a mere two weeks to burn and rip their purchased tracks before they become unplayable. This is the third major music retailer to pull such a stunt in the past five months (see MSN Music in April and Yahoo! in July).
One of the design goals behind DRM was to give publishers the ability to (legally) revoke certain rights after purchase, so seeing it happen in some form isn’t all that surprising. In fact, using revocation to put the screw to legitimate customers was documented a long time ago. Here’s Doctorow in 2004:
Nope, they’re using it to sell you the same crap for more money. Chris loves his Microsoft Media Center PC, “essentially a DVR on steroids” — at least, he loves it so far. That’s because he hasn’t been bitten on the ass by it yet, like this guy, who bought a Media Center PC so that he could catch the Sopranos and burn them to DVD. When he bought the PC, it was capable of doing that. Halfway through the season, the studios reached into his living room and broke his PC, disabling the feature that allowed him to burn his Sopranos episodes to DVD. And if you got suckered into letting your cable company give you a “free” PVR, you’ve got a nasty shock coming this season: your episodes of Six Feet Under will delete themselves from your hard drive after two weeks, whether you’ve gotten around to watching them or not.
So there was definitely an awareness that people were going to get screwed by revocation and that it would be used in ways that wasn’t always targeted at enforcing copyright. But, holy shit, this “taking the DRM server down” thing has been a real surprise. Mass revocation of all rights across an entire customer base? I didn’t see that coming.
What’s going on here? I’m no expert on running a DRM authorization server but I can’t imagine it requires any kind of massive infrastructure, bandwidth, personnel, or resource utilization elsewise. Just leave the damn things up in their current state. Forever.
The need to move away from DRM as quickly as possible is obvious and people who were sold defective media should clearly be given a refund. But neither of these things requires revoking the right to play these crippled tracks in their current form.
I can think of only three possible reasons why these DRM servers are coming down: stupidity, an extremely literal interpretation of “the least you could do,” or the stores suspect that most people will simply repurchase a large portion of their broken media.