Microsoft backpedaled quickly after it became apparent that the public was not that pleased with their decision and decided to keep the servers up and running for another three year period. The huge problem that arises when DRM servers are taken off the Internet is that the verification process will fail which means that users who want to move the music from an old to a new computer – where they had to verify the music again – would realize that they could not do so because of the server being offline.

Yahoo apparently did not pay attention to the media fiasco and decided to close the Yahoo! Music Store and take the DRM servers offline on September 30, 2008.

Yahoo is giving users of their music service the advise to burn the tracks to CD and rip those tracks on the new computer so that they would be able to listen to the music on a new computer as well.

If you needed another reason why DRM is bad then you got it. And it’s not that some small companies decided to turn off their servers, it’s two huge global corporations that decided to do it. (And Google did it as well before with Google Video)

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