Smartphone Thoughts: Wal*Mart Drops Support For DRM - Honest Users Get To Repurchase Music

"Hey suckers! Did you buy DRM music from Wal*Mart instead of downloading MP3s for free from the P2P networks? Well, they're repaying your honesty by taking away your music. Unless you go through a bunch of hoops (that you may never find out about, if you've changed email addresses or if you're not a very technical person), your music will no longer be playable after October 9th. But don't worry, this will never ever happen to all those other DRM companies -- unlike little fly-by-night mom-and-pop operations like Wal*Mart, the DRM companies are rock-ribbed veterans of commerce and industry, sure to be here for a thousand years. So go on buying your Audible books, your iTunes DRM songs, your Zune media, your EA games... None of these companies will ever disappear, nor will the third-party DRM suppliers they use. They are as solid and permanent as Commodore, Atari, the Soviet Union, the American credit system and the Roman Empire. "

I don't advocate stealing music from the various services out there - I tend to buy my digital music from Amazon's MP3 service, which has no DRM. However, if I had purchased music that was tied to my PC and I couldn't move it to another PC because the DRM service was shut down, I'd have no problem "stealing" that music again to get what I paid for. Hopefully, if you purchased music like this you can burn it to a CD then re-rip it DRM free. That is what I used to do when I purchased tracks from Naptster and Yahoo before I moved to Amazon. As for Audible books, who buys Audible books with the intent of keeping them and relistening to them?

Head over to the article lined to above to see the heart-warming letter from Wal*Mart to their loyal customers.