Leo, you must be one of those bigot, racist, hateful, evil-rich Republicans. People taking personal responsibility? Bah! What horrible ideas you are presenting. Why, if they have to do that for their music then what's next? Actually pay their mortgages or suffer the consequences? I think we need a bailout for the disenfranchised music people. The government should buy new DRM-filled music for them with taxpayer's money. After all, isn't that the moral thing to do?
At 10:22 AM 9/28/2008 -0700, you wrote:
Much as I might try to sympathize with these folks, I don't have a lot of sympathy for someone who bought into a system which basically told them "we don't want you to freely listen to music you buy from us" and now is being denied the ability to freely listen to the music they bought.
Rather, a big "we told you so" needs to go out from the anti-DRM folks to all those people who thought that being denied the right to freely listen to their own music would /never/ result in them being denied the right to freely listen to their own music *at all*.
People bought into DRM (and read their T&Cs, right?) and now are getting *exactly what they paid for*. Its the free market in action: an informed public read their T&C (thus the informed part) and still agreed to buy music which could be taken away from them at any moment without a refund of the purchase price. Caveat emptor and similar Latin warnings.
Besides which, economists will rejoice in Yahoo, Wal-Mart, and others' tactics here: now customers are required to purchase their DRMed music *all over again*! What a shot in the arm for the drooping economy!