Respect Authority

Long-suspected nexus of evil, Walmart, accidentally admitted to the public three weeks ago that they are, in fact, a nexus of evil when they announced that they would be shutting down their DRM servers, effectively stealing money from any customers who bought MP3s from Walmart.com, as the move would render all the MP3s unplayable.

Thanks so much for being an honest American consumer by supporting the bands you love, a music industry that enjoys punishing its own best customers, but most importantly, a soulless all-American predator-corporation — hope you enjoyed those Nickelback albums while they lasted, retards! You should have made some copies while you still could… oh yeah, you couldn’t because they were all digitally rights managed, haha, oops! Sure wish you had just gone ahead and broken the silly ol’ law like all the smart people do, huh?

Well, the five people who actually buy music from Walmart.com were rightfully outraged and the greed monsters over at Walmart corporate decided to leave the DRM servers on after all. In fact, they decided to leave the servers on forever. Picture it now… years after nuclear winter have ravaged all our major cities, and the human race has been devastated by disease and war, the only sound in the air will be radioactive winds whispering through the skeletons of ancient skyscrapers… and your Nickelback MP3s, looping for the rest of all eternity. That’s always been my vision of the apocalypse anyway.

This is a prime example of getting what you’ve got coming to you — Walmart jumped on the DRM bandwagon following the music industry’s hard handed copyright-protection mania, and now it has to quite literally pay for its mistake for the rest of all time.

But this is only the beginning: Walmart, while easily the most obviously reprehensible institution involved and therefore that much more enjoyable to watch get the shaft, was just one of a whole litany of companies to inoculate entertainment media with DRM. Hopefully Audible, iTunes and EA Games are as generous as Walmart is, otherwise we will mark these days as the beginning of the Digital Indian-Giving Age. Corporations beware — we got even with those meddlesome Indians by wiping out their population, erasing their culture, and getting all their ancestors addicted to alcohol and cigarettes. Fair’s fair, Squanto — and thanks for all the MP3s! After all, I only paid for them or whatever.

[Boing Boing]