Western Digital Seems to Hate Multimedia

People usually buy external hard drives to complete their inefficient storage space. By inefficient, we usually mean 60 or 80 GB as most of the actual notebooks still carry. Well, talking about inefficiency, an 80 GB hard disk drive can easily carry the whole Library of Congress in textfiles. Not quite inefficient right?

With the advent of multimedia (high quality music and high-definition video content), people's need for storage has dramatically increased. The point of all these statements is to show that people buy external storage units mostly for storing multimedia files. It is also expected that they would be able to retrieve them whenever and wherever they consider it fit.

Well, Western Digital users surely would disapprove since some devices made by the company give their owners a hard time with the sharing of the most common audio and video files. The affected model is the My Book World Edition external drive, a one-terabyte storage device that provides a backup for Windows PCs, as well as the ability to access files from any location, using a common web browser. The limitation is caused by a restriction embedded in the Anywhere Access software, that should prevent unauthorized distribution of copyrighted content.

That is how any type of file can be remotely accessible, except for common formats as AVI, MP3, MPEG and DivX. This should have been the company's response to the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials, but the implementation also prevents users from sharing their own videos or music files.

"The company has started out very conservatively in creating a certain set of features and functions", Brian Miller, director of marketing for Western Digital, told InformationWeek. "As we go forward, the goal is to listen to what the marketplace needs and wants, and identify the most appropriate solution that respects intellectual property."

The company is being criticized, since they have taken the freedom to impose on the users what they can or can not do with their own content. The company's role is to provide users with storage solutions and not to act like a tutor, especially when they can not tell the difference between legal and illegal content.

According to Miller, customers of My Book World Edition have not seemed disturbed by this limitation since they use it in homes and small offices, with the sole purpose of sharing documents and photos. "Most customers we're talking to have been pretty happy with the product", he said.

The public response has been extremely vehement: "Who needs a 1Tbyte network-connected hard drive that is prohibited from serving most media files? Perhaps somebody with 220 million pages of .txt files they need to share?", specialized forums and blogs read. Moreover, the imposed restriction is not even efficient since the simplest workaround would be renaming audio and video files with a different extension, such as "mp3file.txt". The company refused to comment on these bypass tactics.