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DRM is not dead . . . yet

October 10th, 2008
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Last month, Walmart decided to end its involvement in DRM and sent an email to its customers to let them know they needed to protect their purchase by exporting DRM’d music to mp3 on CD. Given the politically-charged debate over DRM, this move was covered widely, including by the bigshots over at TechCrunch.

Not so fast. This morning I received the following email from the Walmart Digital Music Team - they’re not pulling the plug on their DRM server - yet. Apparently it’s not a good idea to yank down a server with only 30 days notice. Who would have guessed?

NOTE: This is a follow-up to our email titled “Important Information
About Your Digital Music Purchases” from 9/26/08.

Based on feedback from our customers, we have decided to maintain our
digital rights management (DRM) servers for the present time.  What this
means to you is that our existing service continues and there is no
action required on your part.  Our customer service team will continue
to assist with DRM issues for protected windows media audio (WMA) files
purchased from Walmart.com.

While our customer support team is available to assist you with any
issues, we continue to recommend that you back up your songs by burning
them to a recordable audio CD. By backing up your songs, you insure
access to them from any personal computer at any time in the future.

We appreciate your support and patience as we work to provide the best
service possible to you.  As we move forward with our 100% MP3 store,
we’ll continue to update you with key decisions regarding our service
and your account via email.

Thank you for using Walmart MP3 Music Downloads.

The Walmart Digital Music Team

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  1. Chuck Burt
    October 10th, 2008 at 11:15 | #1
    Reply | Quote

    An interesting note on DRM, check out the customer reviews on Amazon of the highly anticipated game Spore: http://www.amazon.com/review/product/B000FKBCX4/

    Thousands of one-star reviews specifically lashing out at the game’s DRM. I own the game and while it doesn’t quite live up to all of the hype, it is far better than one-star on its own. I have already run into a couple of issues due to the game’s DRM and would be pretty tempted to give it a one-star too.

    The sad reality of DRM is penalizing legitimate customers for practices out of their control–when it doesn’t even mitigate piracy in the end!

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