DRM pretty much sucks for everyone. The latest to discover how large a pile of suckage it is? Wal-Mart. They wanted to turn off their DRM servers, but - as Microsoft itself discovered - people don't really like being told that the stuff they paid for is being orphaned:

An e-mail sent to Wal-Mart digital music store customers said the company will continue to support the DRM-ed song files sold on walmart.com starting in 2003. The e-mail reversed last month's announcement that Wal-Mart would shut down the servers that authenticate the copyright protected music it no longer sells. Unfortunately, doing so would render all protected music purchased from the store in the past five years unplayable.

So people who bought from Wal-Mart are ok, but Wal-Mart now has the joy of leaving the servers on, and maintaining the abandon-ware DRM system. The only ones who like DRM are the people at the RIAA, but it's been pretty wel established by now that they hate their customers...

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