Friday, July 25, 2008

Yahoo make customers' music evaporate

Microsoft tried this, and had to walk quickly backwards when faced with angry dupes. Now, Yahoo are announcing the switch off of their DRM servers, rendering paid-for music suddenly useless. Unless you never upgrade your computer again. Or suffer a crash. Ars Technica is not impressed:

Yahoo recommends the old, lame, and lossy workaround of burning the files to CD, then reripping them onto the computer. Sure, you'll lose a bunch of blank CDs, sound quality, and all the metadata, but that's a small price to pay for the privilege of being able to listen to that music you lawfully acquired. Good thing you didn't download it illegally or just buy it on CD!

Why would Yahoo have taken this step knowing it made Microsoft look even shabbier when they tried it? Are things so tough at company that they can't afford to leave the server switched on for a few more years?


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