[Macworld]

Post your comments for Yahoo: Burn your DRMed tracks to CD now here

[alandail]

Doing what Yahoo is telling people to do is actually illegal as they are telling people to circumvent copy protection, which is clearly prohibited by the DMCA.

[garneaum]

I know with iTunes you are allowed to burn mix CDs. I think it was up to ten times max? Am I wrong? I might be.

[tfrogh]

And this is another reason why I do not buy digital music. As an IT professional assisting home users with computer migrations and upgrades I have found digital music purchases with DRM to be nothing but a pain. The companies only see the perfect scenario. Those of us in the real world have to deal with the sloppy morons who can barely turn the machine on let alone remember what their email address when they signed up or what account password is.
CDs and DVDs ROCK!!!!
And yes, I have owned an iPod since they came out!

[DougAdams]

Listen: Anyone hear the sound of subscription-model supporters crawling back into the woodwork?

[flybynight]

Illegal or not, they leave consumers no choice. I would argue that what Yahoo! is doing is illegal - they are breaking their contract with their customers. These people bought music under the impression that they would be able to use it forever.

[ibeetle]

DRM does not have anything to do with this story. Although (for better or for worse) there is a little bit of a DRM angle. This is another case of a subscription service folding and customers music potentially evaporating.

When you buy a CD from iTunes it is yours. If Apple shut down iTunes Music Store tomorrow your music would still be on your Apple digital music player, or Apple computer hard drive. You can burn it to a CD. You can back up the data, you transfer it to your iPod/iPhone.

This is just another case of why I (and apparently the majority) of music buyers do not want subscription services. Stop paying your money or worse the service goes under and all your music is gone. iTunes, Amazon, eMusic have gotten my music money for several years now. The music I buy is mine, and I do not have to worry about paying someone $9.99 a month or if this is the month my subscription service announces they going out of business.

[Rhywun]

tfrogh said:

And this is another reason why I do not buy digital music.

DRM is clearly on its way out. There's now more places to buy unrestricted files than ever.

[jrandersoniii]

@ garneaum
I believe you can burn an Apple FairPlay song as many times as you like to a CD; however you are limited to how many times you can burn a specific playlist to a CD for FairPlay tracks. 10x I think per playlist; could be wrong.

[derkathon]

DRM has everything to do with this story. Yahoo did not offer solely a subscription model; they also sold DRMed songs a-la-carte. Those who had the subscription plan aren't really effected--they can switch to Rhapsody and get the same kind of plan. Besides, anyone with a subscription plan knows that they won't be able to play the music once they stop paying. This article is about being unable to authorize the individually purchased tracks and cds for play on a new computer or device. In this regard, Yahoo is similar to iTunes. The iTunes music store requires you to authorize up to 5 computers to play back purchased tracks (with the exception of iTunes plus songs). If the iTunes Music Store were to disappear tomorrow, iTunes purchasers would be in the same boat as Yahoo purchasers.

[bjojade]

This is EXACTLY like Apple's DRM. If you buy a track from iTunes, it lives happily on your computer. However, if you bought a new computer and Apple shut down their iTunes servers, you wouldn't be able to activate the new machine. You would have to burn to CD and then re-rip into your computer.

We all know that computers don't last forever, and you'll need to do this eventually.

[pdkoenig]

The Yahoo terms of use explicitly allows burning of permanently purchased songs onto CDs and subscribers can also access their purchase histories. Those complaints from the EFF don't appear to have been researched adequately. The notion that a failing operation should take out adds in newspapers and magazines around the country is an almost comical bit of overkill to do a massive national campaign to point out something to what must be a relatively small number of purchasers.

I'm not fond of DRM, but get the facts straight.

[alandail]

to clarify my comments earlier. Burning the songs to CD is legal as that is explicitly allowed under the terms of the license the songs were purchased under. Ripping that CD back into the computer is the part that is clearly illegal under the terms of the DMCA as the sole purpose of ripping the songs back in is to circumvent the DRM. This is legally a different issue than ripping a CD that was purchased in a store as doing that does not circumvent any DRM. The DMCA is quite clear about the illegality of circumventing any DRM. Having Yahoo tell customers to do this doesn't make it legal under the DMCA.