The Mandelbear's Musings

Techdirt: Western Digital Decides That You Shouldn't Be Allowed To Share Any MP3

Rich Kulawiec writes in to let us know about a Boing Boing post about some fairly ridiculous limitations on Western Digital's networked drives. Apparently, once you've set up the drive, you can subscribe to a service that will allow others to access your drive from the internet (rather than on the local network). You can set up accounts for specific people, including highlighting what is available to be shared with that person. However, Western Digital has simply decided that under no circumstance can you share a variety of multimedia filetypes, such as mp3s, wmvs, aac or others. Its reasoning is that this is "due to unverifiable media license authentication," which is basically a gibberish way of saying that you might be infringing on someone's copyright.

The actual post has a link to the list of filetypes. So, for example, I wouldn't be able to use this "service" to share my own music.

Thanks for the warning, WD: I'll build my own NAS servers from now on. With drives from somebody else.