Microsoft's Zune makes you violate CC licenses

[mdlbear]

Medialoper » Zune’s Big Innovation: Viral DRM

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.

...and that DRM, in turn, violates the Creative Commons license or any other license that prohibits DRM in order to encourage sharing.

I note in passing that all my music is available under a CC(by-sa-nc) license, and I'd be delighted to be part of a class-action suit against Microsoft.

(From slashdot

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Bastages.

Delenda est Microsoft.

(and I love the icon... somebody had far too much time on their hands, and I hope they used The GIMP rather than a pirated copy of Photoshop... OTOH, Adobe is the one company I hate more than MSFT, after the Dmitry Sklyarov incident, the one time I've ever been moved to personally take to the streets in protest....)

[elimloth.livejournal.com]

That ephemeral music mode is exactly what the RIAA wants, which is why Zune does it. Don't like it? Just buy non-DRMed music. I buy CDs direct from artists and rip the tracks onto my MP3 player. It goes no further. I can't the same for teens and pre-teens having watched many of them casually 'share' their music.

BTW, an interesting statistic about iPod owners appeared in /.. The entry quotes an article in the BBC news which quotes a Jupiter research report that 80+% of the music poured into the iPods is not from music stores. People do not want DRM (who would?) and they are willing to either purchase CDs to rip their music unburdened or rip it from other peoples' CDs.

Nonetheless, casual piracy is a problem. I can't belive how many people ask me to give them a copy of some music I am playing, and how grumpy they get when I give them the CD title and URL containing said music.

My License

[idea-fairy.livejournal.com]

You've started me wondering if I should start using some kind of CC license for my poetry and such.

My current license is a homebrew paragraph that says little more than "Play nice with my stuff, and if you make significant money from it I'd like my share." My excuse for not using CC is that I didn't know about it back in the mid 1990's when I started posting on the Web.