Do you remember that scene for Jurassic Park where they are wandering through the jungle and find dinosour eggs? “How did they do that, we’ve made them all females?” one of the party asks incredulously… “Nature always finds a way.” answers the sage Dr. Grant.

Such is the case with DRM (Digital Rights Management) systems.

With the recent news that Yahoo Music Unlimited was shutting down those poor suckers… err customers, that purchased ‘unlimited’ licenses have learned that ‘unlimited’ means until September 30th of this year. On that date Yahoo! are shutting down the licenses servers that control these ‘unlimited’ tracks. Those tracks will continue to play on the computer(s) on which they were originally licensed but you are no longer able to authorize new computers, devices or restore the files if you buy a new computer or have to rebuild the one you already own. Herein lay one of the many weaknesses of most DRM systems; a centralized authority that can disappear when business conditions change and leave you stranded.

I quote from the Yahoo! Music FAQ (this is where they ‘Nature finds a way.’ bit comes in):

For any user who purchased tracks through Yahoo! Music Unlimited, we highly recommend that you back up the purchased tracks to an audio CD before the closing of the Store on September 30, 2008. Backing up your music to an audio CD will allow you to copy the music back to your computer again if the license keys for your original music files cannot be retrieved.

The moral of the story here is that ANY DRM systems, no matter how ‘customer enabling’ it claims to be, will always be unreliable due to the vagaries of the business climate. One need look no further than owners of the losing high-def DVD format (HD-DVD) for a bleak example. Those million or so folks that purchased HD-DVD players now have very expensive paper weights.

Although the DVD format war was not a DRM issue per-se it is a direct correleary. When a single entity controls a ‘thing’, a DVD format in this case, the future of that ‘thing’ is tied directly to that entity. When Toshiba pulled their HD-DVD players off the market they left customers stranded.

When Yahoo! Music shutters the Unlimited service all those folks that paid in good faith for ‘unlimited’ access to the music are, to put less than a fine point on it, screwed.

Of course, those folks that have discovered FairUse4WM already know what Nature is capable of. I’ll not be providing a link for fear of the anaconda with the DMCA tattoo but as with most things these days ‘Google is your friend.’.

Update:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation have posted a piece on this news.

At the very least, this announcement is further evidence (if such evidence were needed) that DRM is just bad business. It’s bad for the consumers who don’t actually own the music they pay for; it’s bad for the rightsholders who lose out when legal copies of their songs are worth less than illegally obtained copies; and it’s bad for the companies that must choose between maintaining technology that is defective by design or violating the trust of their customers.