MSN Gotcha
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008I hope that you aren’t one of the customers of MSN Music who are about to get hosed.
Here’s the long version of the story from Mark Pilgram who lays the problem out with much precision and detail in his piece, The Day the Music Died. Highly recommended and enjoyable reading.
Here’s the short version — most digital music is sold wrapped with one sort of digital rights management or another. That’s a fancy way of saying that it’s encoded in such a way that it requires a particular software application to play it. The idea is to prevent you from making copies and selling them or giving them away.
The software works by occasionally “phoning home” over the Internet in order to validate that you are indeed the legitimate user of the music.
The MSN Music problem is that Microsoft has decided to terminate that service and will pull those validation servers offline in August of this year. That means that MSN Music customers will be able to continue listening to their music until the next time their software needs to validate that they are the legitimate user.
When the software “phones home” after the drop dead date, no one is going to answer the phone and that music will be lost forever.
Microsoft says that customers should burn their downloaded music to CDROM before the drop-dead date in order to preserve their music. But according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, that may not be a legal alternative. The music isn’t owned by Microsoft which means they can’t authorize you to burn the music to CD.
If it sounds like a big mess, well, it is.
Digital Rights Management is a great millstone hung around the neck of consumers who simply want to buy their music online in digital format. iTunes has made it bloody simple to click and purchase (my purchased library is up to 2600 songs) but, after this MSN Music fiasco, I’m seriously considering only purchasing DRM-free music going forward.
Amazon has a growing collection of DRM-free MP3s and although there are some legal restrictions on redistribution, at least they won’t quit playing on my machine if Amazon goes belly up at some future date.
73 de Jeff
