The DRM Genie Just Won't Go Back into the Bottle
Another milestone has been reached in DRM lameness: Western Digital, which I considered, at least until today, to be the clear leader in the hard drive wars, has instituted DRM on its hard drives:
Western Digital's 1TB MyBook external hard drives won't share media files over network connections (UPDATE: Don't install the "required" client software! See workaround below). From the product page:
"Due to unverifiable media license authentication, the most common
audio and video file types cannot be shared with different users using
WD Anywhere Access."It doesn't matter what
the files are: If you try to share these formats over a network,
Western Digital assumes not just that you're a criminal, but that it is
its job to police users. You see, MP3, DivX, AVI, WMV and Quicktime files are copy-protected formats.
Here is the list of 30 file extensions the hard drive won't let you share. It does not matter if those mp3 files are just dictation files you created yourself using an MP3 recorder -- you still can't share them. Really lame. Why WD feels the need to get into the business of policing this stuff is beyond me. Can you imagine the product meeting. Gee, I think we should jump into the DRM fray, even though we don't receive a dime from the media companies and it will really piss all of our customers off. Corry Doctorow also comments.
