We all know that DRM — the “Digital Rights Management” stuff that keeps you from pirating digital files, in theory — is evil, and is finally starting to wane just a little, with EMI and Universal dropping it from their music downloads this year already.  DRM keeps you from buying something once and being secure in the knowledge that it will always run.  Apple could — again, in theory — decide tomorrow that they want to break every song you’ve ever downloaded through the iTunes music store with a simple flip of a switch.  No, it’s not likely, but it’s not impossible.

Google recently drove this point home when they ended their video rental/download-to-own program.  (They had launched it a year and a half ago.) They charged you for each video ($2, I think?), but you were forced to authenticate ownership of the video everytime you played it. You needed an internet connection to validate the video before it would play on your machine.  So when Google decided last week to kill off their program, it meant that every video you may have downloaded became an immediate virtual brick.  The file was dead, worthless, useless.  It wouldn’t play anymore.  Your money just went down the drain.

Not completely, though. Google’s not that dumb. They credited the money you paid for those video files to your Google Checkout account, whether you had one or not.  In order to get your money back, you had to spend it somewhere else for something else, AND use Google’s Paypal competitor, whether you wanted to or not.

That didn’t fly too well.  Now, Google has changed their mind and are offering to refund your credit card directly, and are asking those with new credit card numbers or expiration dates to please update their info on-line so that they can do so.  They were hoping the Google Checkout thing would be quicker and easier, and I can understand that.  But it locks their users into another product that not all of them need or want.

As a bonus, Google is letting those users keep the Google Checkout credit, too, and keeping the authentication server running for a couple extra months.

In the end, then, DRM became a double-your-money-back proposition.

It’s still evil, though.

But good for Google for fixing a bad situation they helped to cause.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 at 6:40 am and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.