Customers lose music in Wal-Mart DRM scam

Wal-Mart has a music download service???

Up until February, the retail giant featured music that was saddled with digital "rights" management technology. Buyers had to log on to Wal-Mart's website to transfer their music to a music device.

Although only DRM-free music has been offered after February, you still need to log on to Wal-Mart's DRM servers to transfer the music you acquired before then.

But now Wal-Mart is closing its DRM servers effective October 9 - meaning these customers will lose the music they paid for.

Doesn't this defeat the whole purpose of DRM? DRM is useless for the consumer when companies decide to shut down their DRM servers. Of course it's a bonanza for Wal-Mart, which forces folks to buy the song again.

This is exactly like if, back in the days of 45 RPM records, you had to buy another copy of a record because your model of turntable was discontinued.

You could use the analog "hole" to simply play the track and rerecord it onto your computer. But if you were to do that, what's the purpose of digital recordings? You can do that with a record and a stereo cable! However, each time you use this method to rerecord digital music, it loses some of its quality.

Talk about one step up and 2 steps back (as Bruce Springsteen would say)!

(Source: http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/007820.html)