Bit Revolver

Effective October 1^st, 2008, customers who purchased content from the Yahoo! Music store will no longer be able to move their tracks to new computers. Should these customers buy new computers or wish to put their tracks on different hard drives or other devices after 10/1, they will find themselves quite out of luck.

Content from the Yahoo! Music store is crippled with DRM software intended to prevent piracy. In order to legitimately transfer music to new computers and other devices, the software must download a license key from the Yahoo! Music servers. Yahoo! plans to shut down this licensing system on October 1^st.

Yahoo! representatives state that they have been encouraging customers to backup their music to discs for the last six months, however that method results in a sound quality reduction.

Microsoft made this very same announcement with regards to their MSN Music Store in April, and eventually agreed to leave their licensing servers online for a further 3 years. We will soon see if a public outcry forces Yahoo! to make the same compromise.

Whether the deadline is extended for 3 years or 30, a compromise is not good enough — at some point, the licensing servers will be shut off and customers will be left out in the cold… customers who did the right thing and paid money for their digital music. None of this music should have been crippled with Digital Rights Management in the first place. A recording industry waging an all-out-war against piracy should be ashamed of itself for showing such disrespect to people who choose to open their wallets in lieu of illegally downloading free MP3s.

There are a number of online music retailers who sell DRM-free content: Amazon MP3 deals in DRM-free music, and many of the tracks available in the iTunes Music Store do not have DRM.

Link via Daring Fireball.