DRM and the PRO-IP Act - Limited time opportunity? Shameless self-promotion?

[Leo Mauler]

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!

--- On Sun, 9/28/08, Sean Crago <cragos at gmail.com> wrote:

> When I left KC to serve in Kathmandu I lost my address 
> near Gladstone. As such, I reverted to the congressional 
> district where I grew up in Illinois.  You guys probably 
> cover four or five districts in MO and KS, though, so I 
> figured I'd drop you a link to the open letter I just
> hammered out to mine.  If Yahoo, MSN, WalMart, et al are 
> going to pull the plug on their DRM servers right before 
> the passage of the (still far from perfect) PRO-IP act,
> why not use the opportunity to get ammendments passed 
> that allow consumers to bypass the DRM? If it's getting 
> railroaded through anyway, let's turn it to good: The 
> DMCA trust should go both ways, if it's to be retained 
> at all: Consumers shouldn't get their shit turned off if 
> they respect the DMCA's provision preventing them from 
> unlocking their files.
> 
> http://mrzaius.com/blog/?p=108