Microsoft’s underwhelming Zune a ‘viral DRM’ device

“Now that Microsoft has released some hard facts about Zune we can finally begin to sort out how much of an impact the product might have on the digital music market. For weeks we’ve been hearing rumors about how Zune’s wireless capabilities will be used to enable new types of music sharing and discovery. It’s the one feature that could potentially set Zune apart from the iPod,” Kirk Biglione reports for Medialoper.

Biglione reports, “Unfortunately Zune’s wireless music sharing is turning out to be one of those features that seemed better when it was just a rumor. While Zune users will be able share music with friends, there’s a catch (isn’t there always). As Jim noted earlier, recipients of shared songs will only be able to listen to them three times or for three days, whichever comes first. It sort of sounds like a really bad tire warranty.”

“Zune accomplishes this amazingly stupid feat by wrapping shared music in a proprietary layer of DRM, regardless of what format the original content may be in. If Microsoft’s claims are to be believed, this on-the-fly DRM will be seamless and automatic – which must be some kind of first for Microsoft,” Biglione reports. “What Microsoft has created is a new form of viral DRM. Zune will intentionally infect your music with the DRM virus before passing it along to one of your friends. After three listens the poor song dies a horrible DRM enabled death. Talk about innovation.”

Full article here.

Microsoft’s “ZuneInsider,” Cesar Menendez, reports in his blog that everything, even ripped CDs and homemade songs are limited to Zune’s “3 days/3 plays” limitation, “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.”

Full article here.
This article contains one giant leap of faith: that there will ever be two people with Zunes located near enough to attempt infecting each other with Microsoft’s draconian DRM scheme.

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