By Brendan Loy
Unbelievable:
Allan Wood (a baseball megafan who has written a book about Babe Ruth) purchased over $280 worth of digital downloads of baseball games from Major League Baseball, who have just turned off their [Digital Rights Management] server, leaving him with no way to watch his videos. MLB's position is that since these videos were "one time sales," and that means that Wood and everyone else who gave money to MLB is out of luck -- they'll never be able to watch their videos again.
MLB shut down the DRM server because they've changed suppliers, and now they expect suckers to buy downloads of games in the new DRM format. Anyone who does this needs their head examined -- using DRM itself is contemptible enough, but using DRM this way is just plain criminal.
Techdirt says "it's really amazing how far Major League Baseball goes towards pissing off its fans." More broadly, Wired says this is "a perfect example of why DRM is bad. Those who imagined the worse case scenario to be DRM systems failing or disappearing were wrong. The truth is far nastier: DRM will be disabled by content providers any time they please, destroying your media collections whenever the pleasure takes them."
It would be like if Steve Jobs woke up tomorrow and decided that all downloaded music from the iTunes Music Store would no longer work. Which, as a technical matter, he could do, and you wouldn't be able to do anything about it, unless you'd previously burned those songs onto a CD, so that you could rip them back onto your hard drive as DRM-free MP3s -- which would be a "circumvention" and thus a violation of the DMCA, by the way. God bless America.
Of course, as a legal matter, Jobs might be contractually obligated not to do that... and so, IMHO, is MLB contractually obligated not to do what it's doing, unless I'm misreading (or misunderstanding the significance of) this line from the FAQ that was in place at the time of the original downloads, according to the Joy of Sox:
7. Do I have to obtain a license every time I want to watch the downloaded video?
No. When you first try to play the video, a license will be distributed to you and stored by the player. Unless manually deleted, the license will exist forever and will be used when you try to watch the downloaded video on that machine. If you watch the video on a different machine, another license will be required.
I haven't looked this up on Westlaw or Lexis, but I'm pretty sure "forever" means something different from "until we feel like changing our minds."
Prediction: MLB will back down on this, because if they don't, they will face a class-action lawsuit, and they will lose.
(Hat tip: Kat Palmore.)
NOTE: Nothing in this post constitutes legal advice. I am not your lawyer -- I am not anybody's lawyer, yet -- and you are not my client. If you are considering whether to sue MLB, you should get a lawyer, and not rely on anything I've said here. (Thank you, CLE ethics class. Heh.)
UPDATE: As expected, MLB has backed down. But Wood is not satisfied, because they have already reneged on a 20-hour-old promise to be "pro-active" and contact those customers who were screwed over by their actions. Instead, only those customers who discover the problem themselves will be told how to fix it. Wood writes, "This problem was caused solely by MLB, and it's up to MLB to solve it
-- by taking the lead and contacting the customers who are currently
being defrauded. They should have the decency -- and good business
sense -- to publicly announce that a huge problem exists and that they
are working to solve it." But they're not doing that. Also:
These new downloads will still have DRM protection, so customers will
have to go to MLB.com for a license, as they always have. I asked if,
since MLB allows customers to receive a license at only three
separate computers, that as people upgrade or replace their machines
over time, they eventually could be left with no way to play the files
on their fourth computer, the MLB rep said "Yes, that's a problem."
And MLB has no proposed solution to it.
My other sites