Wal-Mart blunders into familiar DRM debacle

Don't these guys read the news? Just a few months ago, both Microsoft and Yahoo! got burned after announcing they were dropping support for the DRM-protected songs they'd sold to customers, and now here's Wal-Mart, cheerfully marching over the same cliff.

Boing Boing reports that customers who bought DRM-protected songs from Walmart.com just got a nasty surprise: an e-mail warning that the retail giant is planning to shut off the DRM servers that let you transfer those purchased tunes from one PC to another. The deadline? Next Wednesday, October 8.

But wait—doesn't Walmart.com sell DRM-free MP3 music? Yes indeed, but it also sold copy-protected songs until February, 2008. If you bought digital music from Wal-Mart after that date, you're fine. If not, your music might end up stuck on whatever PC it's now sitting on, permanently. (To find out for sure, right click on any songs you bought from Walmart.com and look at the file extension; if it doesn't read "mp3", watch out.)

Wal-Mart suggests burning any of its old DRM'd tunes to CD (well, no kidding) before the Oct. 8 deadline. But if you want to put any of those songs on a new PC or MP3 player, you'll have to re-rip them into MP3s—and you'll lose audio quality in the process.

Of course, the news has already raised hackles among consumer advocates—as well it should. But what really kills me is how easily Wal-Mart could have avoided the controversy. After all, both Microsoft and Yahoo! Music (a property of Yahoo!—as is, of course, Yahoo! Tech) stumbled into the same morass just a few months ago.

For its part, Microsoft ended up reversing course, extending its support for older, DRM-protected MSN Music tunes through "at least" the end of 2011 (rather than September 2008, the original deadline). The Yahoo! Music Unlimited store took a different tack, announcing that customers who "have problems" with their DRM'd tunes can request coupons for MP3 replacements from Y! Music partner Rhapsody. Fair enough.

For some reason, though, Wal-Mart seems determined to plow right into the same DRM pothole. Too bad for Wal-Mart, which could have used the good PR by, say, publicly offering MP3 replacement coupons—and even worse for its customers, who'd better start backing up their tunes, pronto.

Related:
Wal*Mart shutting down DRM server, nuking your music collection -- only people who pay for music risk losing it to DRM shenanigans [Boing Boing]