Yahoo! and digital "rights" mismanagement

This is another reason why Yahoo! needs to take its greedy attitude and shove it clean up its ass.

A few years back, Yahoo! ratted out journalists to the Chinese government, which issued stiff prison terms to the reporters. Though Yahoo! is an American company, the Bush regime refused to penalize Yahoo! for this - but consumers appear to have been voting with their browsers, as the service seems to have become but a shadow of its former self.

Now that Yahoo!'s music store is closing, its greed is becoming evident. Yahoo! has decided not to give customers the digital "rights" keys for songs that they've downloaded for a fee from its site. Thus, when a customer replaces their computer, there will be no way to get their music tracks to play ever again.

That's exactly like if a record store closes down and then the owners go to former customers' houses and smash their records the next time they get a new turntable.

Then again, it's not like I ever buyed music from Yahoo!'s shitty site anyway.

Mind you, these are paid downloads we're talking about here. Yahoo!'s customers paid to download them. So they're theirs. Yahoo! has no legal right to make customers pay to keep listening to the tracks they've already purchased or to make the tracks stop working on new computers.

Yahoo! is recommending that customers save their music files by recording them onto a blank CD (thus wasting the CD), playing the CD on a separate component, and recording the music onto the computer as it plays, as if it's an analog recording.

Or you could just use the analog "hole" - except the analog "hole" has been eliminated on many newer computers, because computer makers wanted to appease the digital "rights" Taliban that was paranoid about people copying DRM files!

Doesn't the hassle of dealing with analog recording defeat the whole purpose of digital music? You can probably get better results from a scratchy old 45.

Damn, Yahoo! is dumb!

Digital "rights" management is such a scam that all 4 major record labels have now realized they're better off selling music DRM-free than heaping so much frustration on customers that they turn to file-sharing sites. (Yes, we're down to 4 major labels now thanks to the Far Right's hero worship of corporate mergers.)

(Source: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080724-drm-still-sucks-yahoo-music-going-dark-taking-keys-with-it.html)