Comments on: Wal-Mart reversal teaches us the masses have might

Consumers made a ruckus when MSN, Yahoo, and Walmart.com threatened to stop issuing DRM keys for their music. Each reversed itself. Take a bow.

[wratbatblue]

I obviously haven't been paying good attention, so let me make sure I didn't miss something.

If Apple were to stop supporting its own DRM, that would lock all non-DRM-free music I bought from iTunes in place on whatever hardware platform it's currently imprisoned. Right? So, theoretically, if my music collection were extensive enough, I'd never buy another computer, unless I were prepared to have one computer dedicated specifically to music, and I would in that case have to hope that whatever operating system it currently ran never became truly obsolete, as opposed to technically outdated and inconvenient.

But I COULD burn all of those songs to CD, and then re-import them all as .mp3's, and move them onto whatever new computer I wanted, and even re-encode them as .aac, if I wanted to be that anal.

Is that not possible with music purchased from MSN, Yahoo, and Wally-World? I've never bought any there, so I honestly don't know.

As an aside, I'm surprised that computer manufacturers didn't scream bloody murder at the threats to stop supporting DRM. I know people who have music collections so extensive that they have a higher cash value than any computer. They'd be hesitant to purchase a new computer until they absolutely had to, if it meant doing the burn-to-CD process I mentioned above. That would translate to, at a minimum, a delayed sale for some manufacturer. I have no idea if enough people are in a similar music situation to make a palpable difference in sales, but I'm guessing...maybe?

[jpmays]

I just have this to say to all those digital music fans that are laden with DRM protected music... there is an easy way around it... simply burn the audio files to an audio CD and then re-rip them back to your PC and/or audio device... this will render the DRM useless!

[Imalittleteapot]

Anyway, then your songs sound tinny and messed up from reconverting. A better solution would be if they just released a tool to strip the DRM off. Why won't they do this?

[sandonet]

That's been my experience. You burn to a CD and rerip and the sound quality suffers. And what happens if you have thousands of songs. The service that sold you the song is forcing you to do the labor. There has to be a better way.

[mattumanu]

Hmmm... I've only every had the music ripped from a CD burned from MP3s purchased with DRM sound Tinny and messed unless I encoded the rip at a fairly low bit rate. As it is, if you encode at 256k and up, you wont get tinny and messed up sound.

Here's the real issue. If you take all your music and burn them to a CD, then rip those CDs, you aren't going to have MP3s that have any ID3 tags. You'll have hundreds of Songs with absolutely no information attached to them, and you'll have to go in and enter those tags by hand. That is a tedious process at best, odious and reprehensible that we are forced to do this.

[FellowConspirator]

@wratbatblue: Sort of. iTunes is a little different because you can format-shift the music to CD or DVD (which you can then rip back again to whatever you want). Also, I know that for OS X there are software tools that can be used to make non-DRM copies of your DRM's music. You can, today, write an AppleScript script to convert your library to another non-DRM format -- the only problem being that it will need to play your entire library (e.g., 10,000 hours of music would take 10,000 hours to convert). I presume there are similar methods for Windows too. So, with iTunes, it's a hassle, but not at all insurmountable to get your music moved in case Apple up and stops supporting their DRM. I suspect that there were probably ways to render Walmart's music usable after-the-fact too, but I've never used it, so I have no idea.

The gist is, however, that a vendor that uses DRM has an obligation to support the customer indefinitely (assuming it wasn't stated up-front that it's a rental) since it's necessary to make use of the product that the person paid for. The vendor also needs to provide the mechanism to strip the DRM once the copyright expires (which is not likely, copyright terms are regularly extended to prevent modern media copyrights from ever expiring).

[wratbatblue]

I agree with "the gist is", absolutely. I was just curious as to whether there was a workaround for the stuff from Walmart, as there is in iTunes, regardless of how cumbersome it might be. Oh, by the way, maybe YOU could write an AppleScript script to convert an iTunes library....but not me! Thanks for your reply. :-)

[eBob1]

As I've already stated here and on other message boards, I refuse to buy any media that has DRM. I simply won't have any part of that for exactly this reason.

[thomaspuzio]

Amazon MP3 download service is the way to go. DRM free music downloads which cost less than what they are sold for in iTunes. Do what I do and download them to one folder outside of your main library, then in iTunes choose to add the file to the library and setup your preferences so that iTunes makes a copy when it imports it. That way, you iTunes library is complete and your purchased tracks are archived seperately.

As for removing DRM from iTunes purchased music, the simplest way is as mentioned, burn an Audio CD from them and then re-rip them. Of course there is one MAJOR drawback of doing this, the ID3 tags are not re-imported with the DRM-free tracks that are the product of the re-rip. So basically your tracks with artist/song title/album art/etc. info will turn into "Track 1" by unkown artist. You can manually go in to every track and enter that information but that's a major pain. A better alternative, other than simply buying the original CD or buying from Amazon as mentioned above, is to pay for a simple DRM stripping program. There are lots of them out there, most cost less than $25. I'm sure there are free versions of these programs available too.

Ultimately, I think if you can find the CD on sale somewhere it's worth the buy. Usually they cost a couple dollars more than the downloads, but it saves you the trouble of DRM, and the hassle of having to backup your music to CD-R's or DVD-R's. Plus you get the CD jacket.

[surfboy90291]

How hard is it to write a small, downloadable program to simply strip out the DRM protection from the files? Don't illegal versions of this already exist? Microsoft, Yahoo!, Wal-Mart and - hopefully, eventually, - iTunes could offer this to customers who have purchased protected tracks. Then everyone could turn off their DRM servers. Problem solved.

[paulej]

jpmays, you are correct: one could spend hours burning and ripping music and fiddling with the software settings to get it just right. Frankly, I don't want to waste my time with that. It is really unreasonable for anybody to be asked to do that. I was one of the many irritated by Wal-Mart's decision and, frankly, I'm only slightly more comforted with this reversal. What it means is that my music will still likely be rendered useless at some point. What I'd like Wal-Mart to do is send me DRM-free versions so I don't have to waste my time.

For those who have not experienced the "joy" of moving his/her music from one machine to another, go do it. I had to call Wal-Mart to get them to unlock my account twice; otherwise I could not download the license to play the music I bought. So, the use of the DRM server is not without cost: they have to have somebody sitting around to answer the phone and unlock accounts, I guess.

I actually went out to Walmart.com to see if I could get DRM-free versions of the songs I bought before and, as you can imagine, many of them were not being sold on Wal-Mart any longer. I guess when Wal-Mart pulled the DRM plug, some labels pulled their music, too.

I swear, this is one of the most screwed up businesses I've ever seen. Many of us try to do what's right and for what? To get mistreated? To be forced to waste our time? I understand the music industry's concern with piracy, but they've done everything wrong from the outset.

At least things appear to be changing. I for one will no longer buy a DRM-laden music of videos. If that means doing without, fine. It just isn't worth the time and frustration that DRM has caused me.

[sandonet]

The music industry was among the first to have to deal with the digital revolution so they didn't have much precedent. The labels were forging new ground. That said, they made some bad choices. I know lots of people in technology, and many of you, were hollering that DRM was a bad idea. Now, here is Yahoo and MSN and other music services, which were forced into offering DRM music by the labels, are now struggling to shut down their old systems. They are locked into DRM. Are the labels picking up part of the tab for keeping these servers going?

[mattumanu]

Are the labels picking up part of tab? That's a good question. I'd wager the answer is "no".

[flared0ne]

I suspect that, past some fairly obvious point of "MAJOR Pain", DRM has just found a NEGATIVE "return on investment" variable that will have to be added in to any DRM effort from here out into the future -- up until now, the cost of maintaining the DRM infrastructure has kinda been ignored, pushed into the background.

I like the idea mentioned above, where terminating DRM infrastructure support requires release of a DRM-stripper... Of course, that approach opens up [EVERYONE ELSE using the same mechanisms]. Hmm. Decisions, decisions.

Of course, it MAY take some form of class action suit against some DRM-key maintainer (specifically, resulting in significant payout to past purchasers) before the whole idea really hits the skids -- but just a suggestion: start saving a receipt log for all your DRM-encumbered purchases; it may increase your leverage/refund at some point in the future.

Of course, too much glee is probably premature -- I can think of at least three different approaches (using something resembling PGP) to implement both a user-specific and a vendor-specific DRM-release key that would handle the 'ongoing support' issue without inconveniencing other DRM efforts.

Evolution in progress.

[kyle5434]

There's also the issue that taking songs already in a lossy compressed audio format and burning them to a CD, then ripping and compressing to another lossy audio format, reduces the audio quality even more. Granted, most younger people I know have never heard lossless audio and are entirely ignorant about what they're missing, so I tend to think along the lines of "If people think that neon orange powdered mac and cheese dinners are the pinnacle of culinary cuisine, maybe it's better not to let them know otherwise".