Obvious Diversion

I was fairly excited to see Microsoft get into the portable music space (unlike it’s hardware partners) mainly because Apple should get some serious competition to keep them on their toes, but thus far Zune looks like a list of dopey mistakes.

“Plays for Sure” to Become an Embarrassment?

For starters, Zune will not play any of the windows media content you’ve already purchased from Microsoft’s partners. Remember “Plays for Sure”? If you spent any money on that, it won’t play at all on Zune. This is simply embarrassing and I can’t imagine how a choice like this ever got approved.

Violating the Rights of Artists

Secondly, Zune seems to violate the rights of artists. Zune lets you share music file with other Zune users wirelessly. Sounds cool, right? I wrote about this idea nearly two years ago in the hopes that someone would make it happen, but this is not the way to do it. Right idea, wrong implimentation.

The problem is, by default, slaps this rediculous restriction on all files that will only allow you to play the shared song three times over three days. After that, you can’t use it at all. The problem here is many musicians use Creative Commons licenses that say you can go ahead and share away, but don’t put restrictions on my work, and it would be cool if you could make it to a show and buy a t-shirt.

Haven’t heard of Creative Commons? The short version is that it makes it easy for anyone who creates anything to decide what can be done with their work, without the aid or feeding of a lawyer they can’t afford anyway.

A Microsoft employee recently posted the following on their blog in regards to Zune’s presumptive DRM.

“I made a song. I own it. How come, when I wirelessly send it to a girl I want to impress, the song has 3 days/3 plays?” Good question. There currently isn’t a way to sniff out what you are sending, so we wrap it all up in DRM.

Ignorance doesn’t excuse you from the law. Creative Commons licenses are machine readable, meaning that Zune could understand and respect the choices that artists made over their own work, but it doesn’t. One would hope this is simply ignorance that can be corrected as opposed to a high level choice that a whole new set of rights should be instantly imposed on work that doesn’t belong to Microsoft in the first place. If they ship the product in this state, it’s only a matter of time before a class-action lawsuit for artists is filed against Microsoft for violating the stated legal choices of thousands of Creative Commons artists.

The Un-Launch

Did Microsoft launch Zune or did they just hang out with a bunch of bloggers? If it’s “launched”, where can I buy it exactly? When is it coming out? No one seems to know. It’s curious to watch all this talk about a product that seems to be in it’s formative stages and is likely to not ship in reasonable quantities for the holidays anyway.

Don’t get me wrong, I want to see competition in this space. But throwing money at bloggers to raise excitement about a product that still seems like a rebranded prototype is not competition. It’s just noise.