Microsoft did it, and so did Yahoo. Now Wal-Mart is giving its customers an object lesson in the downside of digital rights management. The store sold MP3s heavily laden with DRM, and required the store to authorize the  use of the music you bought on a new computer. The multibillion-dollar business has given up the DRM ghost and is moving to MP3s, but it’s too cheap just to keep that part of the business open, so it, like MSN and Yahoo before it, is warning previous customers that they should burn their songs onto CDs and then re-import them to get around the DRM markings*.

Story from Technologizer here.  Writes Harry McCracken:

Remember, Wal-Mart’s music was promoted with Microsoft’s PlaysForSure tagline, one of the hollowest promises ever made in the history of personal technology. I don’t know how much it would have cost Wal-Mart to keep its DRM servers chugging, but I suspect it could have come up with the dough if it had considered PlaysForSure to be an obligation rather than hollow marketing copy.

(Link via Mac Daily News.) Both M’soft and Yahoo eventually backed down in various ways; Wal-Mart should simply just replace the inferior product it sold people with DRM-free MP3s.

* And again, this process merely illustrates how weak the DRM was in the first place.