Digital Home Thoughts: Another DRM Death - What are the Customers' Rights?

"The Washington Post reported (found by way of Engadget) that Vongo, the all-you-can-view movie site run by Starz, has gone belly up. I used Vongo a few times for various feature stories but never got hooked. (If you're wondering, journalists like me often test new services using a press account that expires after some period of time. For services like Rhapsody and Zune, I used them for the press trial and then decided to sign up and pay monthly. Why two music services? Why, one for my Creative Zen and one for my Zune, of course. And then there's my iPod, but we won't go into that redundancy here.) Starz is just moving all the content over to the Verizon service called Starz Play. The catch is that you have to be a Verizon customer. If you're not, the Vongo service will go dark on September 1 and any movies you have downloaded and paid for (via the $10 monthly fee) will no longer be available.

Update: Vongo pointed out to me that you do not have to be a Verizon customer to use Starz Play. You just need a credit card. I agree with them that this means it is not a great example of what happens when a Web 2.0 site goes dark -- Vongo customers can just sign up for Starz Play and the fee is a few bucks less per month. However, they do have to go through that sign-up, re-download any movies, etc. It is not painless -- I would prefer that they do what Yahoo Music does: they just let you switch over to Rhapsody. That said, it is a reminder that sites like Yahoo Music and Vongo will not exist forever."

For all you Vongo customers, if you read the update in the article, it is not quite as bad as it could have been. While you do have to re-download all your videos from a different site, you are not losing access to all your content, at least not as far as I can tell. But the article brings up a very interesting point afterwards in that 'what are web 2.0 sites' responsibilities, or customers' right to their content, when the site goes belly up'? Reminds me of the dot com boom/bust era style debates. What do you think?