Baseball fan Allan Wood, who downloaded dozens of major-league games through the Major League Baseball service and paid good money for them (close to $300), wrote a post yesterday that got a lot of attention in both the blogosphere and traditional media: it seems his files suddenly stopped working, because MLB had changed the kind of digital-rights management it used and failed to tell anyone. Not only that, but they refused to provide any refunds or allow him to download the games again.
Wood has blogged about this problem before, but for whatever reason (because it got picked up by Techmeme.com perhaps? Or BoingBoing?) it got more attention this time — and MLB apparently heard about the rising storm of negative publicity somehow. An update to Wood’s blog says that he got a call from a representative for the league, who admitted that they had handled things badly, and said that everyone affected would be able to download their games again for free. Staci at PaidContent also talked to someone at MLB about it.
Score: Baseball – 0; Blogosphere – 1.