Watch Out! Sony DRM Is A Rough Experience

If you find yourself purchasing videos from Sony’s Playstation Network, be wary: You may want to read the Terms of Service thoroughly or you could risk the possibility of losing all of your purchased digital goods thanks to Sony’s DRM policy.

An Ars Technica forum-goer dubbed Noise found this out the hard way and warns others of this unfair policy. Having deleted purchased content from his hard drive in order to free up space - he later found that he was unable to re-download the videos.

“Purchased content can be downloaded to a single Playstation 3 or a single PSP system.” “Content cannot be redownloaded once it has been downloaded to either a Playstation 3 or PSP system.” “Consumer service can issue a redownload as a one-time courtesy, as provided by our guidelines, for the title to allow the consumer to go back and download the movie from their PSN download list.”

Noise may have lucked out this time with his “one-time courtesy” of a free download for video he’s already paid for but it’s his money and they should be his to keep for good. May this be a lesson and warning to all those who use the Playstation Network. Don’t let Sony screw you out of your money.

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Yahoo! Redeems Itself

Filed under: Internet, Software

Remember how Yahoo fucked you out of all your music by shutting down its DRM server and not giving you any reimbursements? Well, it has rightfully decided to reimburse its paying customers. Turns out Yahoo feels bad for screwing customers over. Nice of Yahoo! Music to consider the folks who keep its workers from going hungry.

Yahoo, in return for shutting down their music service, is promising either refunds or a replacement DRM-free version of tracks that you downloaded via its service. All current users will automatically migrate to Real’s Rhapsody service. Gone are the days that the recording industry makes money off of forcing folks to rebuy all their music every time there’s a format change. Trent Reznor makes his music free, why can’t everyone else?

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