Bad News for Good Gamers - Xbox 360 DRM still not transferrable

If you've been following this site, you know that part of its mission is gamer advocacy. When you have limited time to enjoy games, you don't need problems like losing offline and shared access to your Xbox 360 purchased content. So I've been ranting about the Xbox 360 DRM since 2006. Recently, I repeated reports that the problem had seemingly been fixed - and I've had many Microsoft support and game store employees parrot this line to me. Alas, I did not get firsthand confirmation when both of my 360s went in for repairs last year since they were fixed, not replaced. Now we're hearing that this is clearly not the case from The Consumerist:

In October of 2007 my 360 experienced a hardware failure and the red ring of death. [...] [My] new replacement console has a different serial number and as a result all of my downloaded content only works now when the purchasing profile is signed into Xbox live. Additional profiles on the system can no longer access the content. I can no longer access the content when I'm not signed into Xbox Live. So any internet issues with my system or Xbox Live (which experienced serious problems for most of last month) means I can no longer use the items I have purchased. [...] I ask [Microsoft support] when I can expect it to be resolved and he says I quote: "hopefully sometime in 2008."

It's not clear from the post whether they are discussing a fix for all users with this problem, or if they are specifically talking about relicensing this one user's purchased content for his new console. I would hope the former, since manually fixing individual customer's content seems impractical though not particularly time consuming unless they are backlogged performing this task for thousands of customers. When this happened to me in 2005 right after launch, they gave my wife Microsoft points to repurchased the 4-5 items I had lost when my launch console was replaced - but this approach doesn't scale to the hundreds of items I have bought since then, and it's ripe for abuse. Sad news for anyone who purchases Xbox Live Marketplace content...