Phil’s Filings

So, yesterday, Microsoft unveiled their new music player media platform — the Zune. Since I’m looking for something to replace my MP3 CD player (there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just that I’m tired of having to burn a CD every time I want to hear new MP3s with it. Before flash memory or cheap small hard drives, it was the best thing around. Times change), I’ve been waiting to hear what this would be. Apple already pretty much sold me with their upgraded 5G iPods earlier this week — a black 80 GB iPod is sooooo pretty — but I figured I should give Microsoft a chance.

Well, it intrigued me at first. But the first strike was announcing that the storage size was 30 GB. Um… no, I want more.

The second strike comes from reading this article. Assuming it’s true, there’s something really worrisome in there. Because the Zune is WiFi-enabled, one user can share a song with another. However, the song on the second user’s Zune can only be played 3 times within 3 days before it expires. How does it do this? The Zune wraps it in it’s own DRM:

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….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.

No, thank you. I have many MP3s on my hard drive that are legal and DRM free. And you think you can just put your own DRM on it? Screw that noise.

(See also http://www.zuneinsider.com/2006/09/answers_to_some.html)

That doesn’t even get into the issue Medialoper brings up that such a thing could violate files licensed under Creative Commons.

Bye-bye, Zune.

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