Wal-Mart Leaves The Light On

Retail giant Wal-Mart has had a change of heart (or at least a panic attack about bad PR in a time of economic crisis): After threatening to shut off its online music store’s DRM servers on Oct. 9–you know, yesterday–it’s decided to keep those servers up and running, so people who bought protected audio files before the whole enterprise switched over to an MP3-only operation can keep on listening to those songs without burning them to a CD. And it’s all because of “customer feedback”! Not to mention the idea that asking people to truck out and buy CD-Rs ($14.88 for a 50-disc spindle!)) in the current economic moment clashes a bit with the company’s overall “always low prices, even though the result is basically you shopping yourself out of a job” mandate. [Engadget]