Napster Canada has advised its customers that it is shutting down operations effective December 16, 2011. The move comes weeks after Napster US became part of Rhapsody and users were assured that Canadians would be unaffected by the move. The company warns users to create backup copies of downloaded music since purchases may be lost due to its digital lock system. The company warns:

These downloads are DRM-encoded WMA files and can be backed up by burning them to audio CDs. Doing this will allow you access to your music on any CD player and generally have a maintenance free permanent copy. If you do not back up your purchased Napster music downloads by burning them to CD and you later change or reinstall your computer’s operating system, have a system failure or experience DRM corruption, then the downloads will stop playing and you will permanently lose access to them.

The issue of lost purchases due to digital lock systems has arisen again and again over the years from Bell Video to Yahoo Music. Bill C-11 will only make matters worse, since consumers will be locked out of their purchases and face the prospect of being unable to legally access works they have paid for in circumstances where the company decides to drop out of the market and stop support for their digital lock system.