p2pnet - rss feed: Zune, DRM and ’shrill demands’
2pnet.net News View:- After posting a fairly positive commentary on the Zune player it pains me to say that it looks like Microsoft’s willingness to compromise its technology in order to satisfy the increasingly shrill demands of the content industry means that the player will be significantly less interesting or useful than it first seemed.
As more reports come out on how the DRM will work it looks like you won’t even be able to play protected media from non-Microsoft sources like Napster.
According to the EFF:
Microsoft’s Zune will not play protected Windows Media Audio and Video purchased or ‘rented’ from Napster 2.0, Rhapsody, Yahoo! Unlimited, Movielink, Cinemanow, or any other online media service.
They believe this because
Buried in footnote 4 of its press release, Microsoft clearly states that “Zune software can import audio files in unprotected WMA, MP3, AAC; photos in JPEG; and videos in WMV, MPEG-4, H.264? — protected WMA and WMV (not to mention iTunes DRMed AAC) are conspicuously absent.
Of course this may just be an omission, and it’s certainly one they could correct. Much more worrying is that Microsoft has clearly stated that they will wrap DRM around ALL files shared from player to player so that the recipient will only have three days/three plays - and this will apply even to unprotected content, stuff you’ve written and recorded yourself and even Creative Commons licensed material (thereby breaching the CC license).
According to the Zune Insider blog:
There currently isn’t a way to sniff out what you are sending, so we wrap it all up in DRM. We can’t tell if you are sending a song from a known band or your own home recording so we default to the safety of encoding.
I love the use of the word ’safety’ here- safe for the media-industrial cartel, I suspect, but not for ordinary users.
More on this on Medialoper, which christens it ‘viral DRM’ and points out that:
wireless music sharing is turning out to be one of those features that seemed better when it was just a rumor
In fact the whole Zune project is starting to look like a fantastic opportunity that will be thrown away just in order to keep the record and movie industries on board.
Why didn’t Microsoft decide to build a great, open player and store and offer unlocked content from artists who it would support. After all, instead of spending a few hundred million dollars marketing a player that won’t do what we want, they could have given the money to recording artists to make great content.
Bill Thompson - andfinally.com
[Thompson is a UK-based writer and broadcaster. He has a weekly column on the BBC WebWise site, and contributes both on and off-line to The Guardian, The Register and The New Statesman, among others. His “inappropriately-titled ‘billblog’ “appears weekly on BBC News Online in the technology news section.]
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September 23rd, 2006 at 7:33 pm
Articles like this one make me nervous. As annoying and as frightened as the major labels and studios are, they are not the ones directing this game of chess against citizens. They are asking for the impossible, which is to make digital content less able to be copied (like trying to make water not be wet). A few hardware vendors have decided to use their fear and lack of technology knowledge and turn these industries into pawns in a game being played by these hardware vendors.
The studios and labels will not and can not benefit from DRM. The only beneficiaries are the platform monopolies that are created, meaning it is companies like Microsoft, Apple and Sony (electronics) that are playing this game, with the companies that make up the MPAA and RIAA only being pawns.
September 24th, 2006 at 12:24 am
Like I want someone else deciding what technical limitations MY music has. DRMing Creative Commons music?
This deserves boycotting on principal, not just on the bogus technical limitations.
September 24th, 2006 at 5:08 pm
“with the companies that make up the MPAA and RIAA only being pawns”
Right on.
But there are more pawns that meet the eye.
Pawns also are the copyright burocrats that endorse and the politicians that approve the disfunctional laws that prohibit defeating DRM in the privacy of one’s home.
Pawns are also the politicians of second tier countires (with the USA being the only first tier country in the world) that approve laws only because dominant Uncle Sam wants them to do it.
Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com