Treated like a thief
Wednesday night Amber purchased and downloaded a song from American Idol. It was in WMA format, and required an activation code. No problem — the code was on the download page. Just copy and paste.
Only it didn’t work. It kept giving her scripting errors. I played with it a bit, and on about the third try the little browser window gave that warning, the “Do you really want to run this ActiveX control?” warning. I clicked yes, and everything worked.
Is this how easy all DRM will be now? Where a competent computer user like my wife will be stumped? Where Internet Explorer will only give you the actual error after several tries?
It’s so nice to spend money and then be treated like a thief.
April 7th, 2007 at 10:45 am
I had a similar problem with an electronic book I bought for a class. I was locked out inexplicably a few short weeks after I downloaded it. I’m not all anti-DRM and what not, but DRM should never lock out a legitimate purchaser. A friend of mine did a great write-up about responsible DRM, it’s a really good read: http://www.50pixelsofevil.com/DRM-quicky