What happens if you want to turn off the server?

September 27, 2008 by michael
Filed under: Linking Out 

Here’s an interesting case study for those of you in the SaaS business. Wal-Mart recently announced that it was going to shut down its DRM-backed music store. The upshot is the people who purchased the music won’t be able to use all the downloads they paid for in the way they intended.

This made me think of situations where you’ve got clients that have some data offline, and some online like… say… Sunnyvale’s Evernote.

I’d be shocked if Wal-Mart didn’t have a clause in its license that allowed it to do this. I’d be shocked if Evernote doesn’t have the same.

Nevertheless, there’s a lot of bad press (I call this blog law since there are at least 8 million posts on the subject in the last four hours alone) and at least one commenter on CrunchGear calls for a “Class. Action. Lawsuit.”

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