I rail against DRM on a fairly regular basis here at FreshDV, and it’s sparked some interesting discussions with readers from time to time. It’s not that I advocate piracy, it’s that I am adamantly opposed to restrictions being placed on what has been lawfully bought and paid for by the consumer. Furthermore, I’ve always maintained that anything that restricts the consumer will only further foster piracy on some level. The answer is not draconian control policies, the answer is easily accessible content available at a reasonable price point.

On this topic, I just read the news over at Ars Technica that Yahoo Music was going under. Not a huge surprise, what with Amazon, iTunes, and of course the Zune marketplace, it’s tough competition out there. Unfortunately in the case of Yahoo Music, they will be taking their DRM licensing servers offline with them. What this means is that customers who have lawfully purchased music tracks from Yahoo Music will be unable to move those tracks to new computers. The tracks are DRM’d, and since there is no way to authorized the move once those servers go offline, you are just out of luck. Thanks for your business, sorry for ya! That plain sucks. And if you’re keeping score, Microsoft announced the same sort of thing earlier this year when they discontinued MSN Music (on a positive note, they backed off a bit and will keep auth servers up till 2011). Here’s an excerpt from Ars:

“Once the Yahoo store goes down and the key servers go offline, existing tracks cannot be authorized to play on new computers. Instead, Yahoo recommends the old, lame, and lossy workaround of burning the files to CD, then reripping them onto the computer. Sure, you’ll lose a bunch of blank CDs, sound quality, and all the metadata, but that’s a small price to pay for the privilege of being able to listen to that music you lawfully acquired. Good thing you didn’t download it illegally or just buy it on CD!”

“Ars has been one of only many groups banging the anti-DRM drum for years. We’re not pro-piracy, we’re just not dumb as rocks. DRM makes things harder for legal users; it creates hassles that illegal users won’t deal with; it (often) prevents cross-platform compatibility and movement between devices. In what possible world was that a good strategy for building up the nascent digital download market?”

Just another example of why DRM is anti-consumer rights. Here’s hoping that DRM-free services like Amazon’s music store will continue to flourish in the coming months and spread to other forms of media distribution, like moving pictures.

UPDATE: It looks as though Yahoo may now be offering it’s stranded users a refund for music purchases, and is researching the possibility of giving them a DRM-free MP3 version of their music. That’s more like it…