This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Python Buzz
by Ryan Tomayko.
Original Post: Mass Revocation
Feed Title: Ryan Tomayko (weblog/python)
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Feed Description: Entries classified under Python.
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.
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