Aine wrote:You know, I did swoon. This whole DRM thing is fascinating. Never did I think just stuff would be interesting, and in large part that's because no one has ever made it remotely comprehensible. It does, though, tend to enhance somewhat my ever-increasing despair with certain aspects of technology and people in general.
Are you willing to tell us any more about the "well-publicized situations:?
One example that springs to mind is the now defunct MSN music store from Microsoft. They (Microsoft) used a DRM mechanism called PlaysForSure to protect the media from this store. Then they released the Zune and switched to a new DRM mechanism. They continued to support the PlaysForSure key servers, but have announced that they will be switching the servers off in late Summer of 2008. Users that purchased music from the MSN store have to identify a computer to be permanently entitled to play the music (yes, a single computer, just one bad hard drive away losing its authorization, or one computer upgrade away from not being authorized), or lose access to the music they bought.
http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/23/micr ... ic-owners/
Another example is Sony's walking away from the ATRAC music format:
http://www.engadget.com/2007/08/30/so-l ... r-nothing/
Maybe "well publicized" should be qualified with "in nerd circles."
