Yahoo Music just announced that it's pulling the plug on its DRM server — that means that as of September 30, everyone who bought Yahoo Music will lose the ability to recover it from backup or transfer it to a new PC. Like I said when MSN Music proposed to do the same thing: "All those years the music industry spent insisting that the only way they'd sell music is with crippling DRM attached managed to totally discredit the idea of buying music at all."

Once the Yahoo store goes down and the key servers go offline, existing tracks cannot be authorized to play on new computers. Instead, Yahoo recommends the old, lame, and lossy workaround of burning the files to CD, then reripping them onto the computer. Sure, you'll lose a bunch of blank CDs, sound quality, and all the metadata, but that's a small price to pay for the privilege of being able to listen to that music you lawfully acquired. Good thing you didn't download it illegally or just buy it on CD!

No, you were one of the digital pioneers, and in this brave new frontier world, a few people are just going to get malaria. Fact of life. And someone will step in a bear trap, and then it's time for the bite rag, the alcohol, and the saw. Just the price of progress. And yes, some poor group will get trapped in snowfall when crossing the pass, and cannibalism may or may not be involved by the time they stumble barefoot from the mountains next spring. No one can prevent such tragedies.