Wal-Mart Latest To Leave Owners of DRM'd Music In The Lurch

(PaidContent.org)  This story was written by Joseph Weisenthal.

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Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) is doing a new rendition of an old classic The retailer's online music wing has told customers who bought DRM'd tracks from it that come October 9, it will no longer support these tracks, meaning they cannot be backed up or transferred to a new computer. They will, however, play on the computer for which they were originally bought. The solution: Burn your tracks to CDs and then rip those CDs back to non-DRM'd MP3s. Yes, as people have pointed out, there's great irony in the fact that CD burning is a solution, when this type of circumvention was frowned upon in the past. This is basically the same as what happed to Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) music customers this past summer. MSN Music was also set to orphan its customers, but decided to postpone DRM server shutoff until 2011. The full memo sent to Wal-Mart customers can be seen here at Gizmodo.


By Joseph Weisenthal