Yahoo! Vows! Freedom! For! DRM! Prisoners!

Fixed!

Fix! The! Headline! Please!

People who are so dumb to buy DRM crippled tracks ought to learn from this mistake by having to buy all that music again. Do not feed these idiots...

Look, there's the trust issue. They tried to serve up DRM'd product as a 'sale' when in fact it was a limited use license with a nuisance license check each play.

That was Gates thinking, it was dumb, he cost the music industry a fortune in lost sales, but more importantly he broke the trust agreement with his customers.

Look at Vista, the OS with DRM built in, the OS that, IF IN DOUBT, will deny you the right to play your media because it's not sure you have the right. Again he broke the trust agreement with his customers and it contributed to Vistas problems.

To make a successful music store Yahoo have to rebuild that trust relationship and replacing DRM'd sh*t with non DRM'd shit for free is the first step. Oh and stop listening to Gates Ballmer etc., just because they had a successful OS and Office package in the early 90's doesn't excuse their endless failures after that.

Typical. All this DRM hoopla has come a full circle. So what will happen to the lovely MusicMatch Juke box which they purchased and PROMPTLY crippled ?? Can they restore it to its former glory?

Alas .. .All this DRM shite that everyone bought into. And lets face it, theres not much good new music coming out these days, anyway.

So they will be recycling old hits DRM free endlessly ! How pathetic.

Paris, co's shes not as dumb as others.

Presumably Yahoo! have a set of private keys that they use to encrypt the content.. couldn't they provide customers with some sort of simple unlocking tool to remove the DRM from the tracks? Seems like this would save a lot of time and effort compared with dealing with customers individually..

They do seem like a company that tries to do things right, I wish them well in these turbulent times.

Hell, where's the Amazon one? I like iTunes+ fine and Digital7 has some DRM-free stuff in 192kbps and 256kbps mp3 format, but the variety is lacking...

>And lets face it, theres not much good new music coming out these days, anyway.

Have you ever thought that media companies are purposely not putting anything new out that is good?

Sometimes I get the feeling that they are stockpiling talent until they have figured out digital control.

Probably me just being paranoid but...

It sure seems like there have been no significant new releases in music or film for a long time.

During the Qtrax fiasco I think I remember reading that Amazon were going to launch an MP3 service in the UK by the end of the year. Whether their range is any better than 7digital's depends on the record labels, though - if Universal/Sony won't play ball with 7digital and Play.com why would they with Amazon?

Google for "before the music dies" for an interesting documentary about some reasons why there are no significant new releases.