Slashdot Log In
Zune's Viral DRM Will Violate Creative Commons
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Sep 15, 2006 12:34 PM
from the zune-make-cc-angry dept.
from the zune-make-cc-angry dept.
lopy writes "Medialoper has noted that Zune's highly touted wireless file sharing will infect otherwise unprotected audio files with proprietary DRM. In cases where users are sharing songs covered by any of the Creative Commons licenses, this would be a clear violation of those license. From the CC FAQ: 'If a person uses DRM tools to restrict any of the rights granted in the license, that person violates the license.' It'll be interesting to see how and if the CC community responds." An anonymous reader wrote in mentioning a post to the Crave blog, relatedly exploring how the Zune stacks up to the iPod.
Related Stories
[+]
News: Microsoft Launches the Zune 472 comments
Doug-W writes to mention an Engadget post about Microsoft's launch of the Zune. From the article: "Not a lot of surprises in the specs department, but they've confirmed the basics we've known for a while, like WiFi, 30GB of HDD, built-in FM, a 3-inch screen and the basic music, pictures and video playback. They also finally let slip the screen res -- an unsurprising QVGA -- and some better news on the codec front: the Zune supports h.264, MP3, AAC and WMA. As for ballyhoo, wireless Zune-to-Zune sharing is where the real action is at, and it works pretty much like we've been hearing: you can share a full-length track with a friend, and they've got three times to listen to it over a three day period, after which they can flag the song for purchase on the Zune Marketplace -- unless they're an unlimited 'Zune Pass' subscriber, of course."
[+]
News: Zune's Wireless Almost Totally Worthless 442 comments
mikesd81 writes to mention an article at Engadget exploring what the Zune's wireless is good for. It turns out that, at least for now, that's not much. From the article: "You can search for and find other Zunes nearby. You can send songs / albums for the 3 x 3 trial. Songs past the three days / listens are deleted at next sync, but catalogued on your PC for record-keeping should you want to purchase them later. No word on whether Microsoft is going to keep track of which files are traded. You can send and receive image files for 'unlimited viewing.' (Oh, so copyrighted images aren't worth DRMing?) You can't: Connect to the internet, Download songs directly from the Zune store via WiFi, Sync to your computer via WiFi."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
fool me once... (Score:3, Insightful)
Fool me once, shame on me.
With DRM, Microsoft, RIAA, MPAA, and the usual cast of characters, it's "fool us a billion times...", it doesn't seem to matter, they keep throwing this kind of foolishness our way.
I guess the good news about this is the silly layer of DRM adds that more assuredness the Zune will be a miserable also ran in the market.
Users will get over the cool factor quickly, especially when the favorite song someone shared with them stops playing three days later. Yeah, there's probably documentation. Who reads it?
I don't see any ads for this device touting "share your tunes three times or three days, whichever comes first!" to catchy music. If I were to buy one of these (not) anticipating the magic of wireless sharing I would return it immediately on learning the fine (hwah?, not so fine?) print.
And, what other silly DRM is layered? I wonder (and almost suppose) Microsoft further encumbers shared songs a la making a song shared by someone unshareable by a sharee...
And, if Microsoft wanted to limit the listening, why so Draconian a limit? WTF? If a tune has any texture, any depth, any insight at all, it can take a lot more than three listens to develop an ear for that song. Too bad. Clearly this is not the era to be exposing listeners to Beethoven or Mozart.
As for my part, I now freely distribute copies of music from my collection to any who want them. I always verbalize the disclaimer they must buy if they like with a wink and a nod. I know now my good faith efforts before were empty gestures. (I even refused in the past to let my daughters make tapes of CDs for their friends, not any more...)
This is all really too bad, because it could be interesting use of technology. Not really my cup of tea (I've posted on this earlier, responses to my post convinced me there could be some market for this).
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
From the perspective of a musician, I'm happy when people share copies of my band's album. If I could beam you a copy from across the room then I'd actually consider getting a wireless enabled music player! The point of recording music (for most musicans anyway) is so that people can enjoy it, not to turn a profit. Here... If you like
Why players need video screens... (Score:3, Funny)
That is why these players need video screens. You need "Eyes"
Re:Why players need video screens... (Score:4, Funny)
I would, on balance, rather kill myself.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I was quite interested in the format at the time, but without buying "professional" equipment for an extra $1k you couldn't create master tapes.
If I made or bought a song, I don't want to have to figure out which machine the "original" is on in order to put it on my mp3 player.
Still a flawed system. (Score:4, Insightful)
Just because it doesn't prevent all copies doesn't make it any less flawed from an inherent information-theory and cryptological standpoint, and in the long run I think it's doomed to failure. The only question is whether, in failing, it manages to take down a few otherwise-good formats with it.
Parent
Zuna vs. P2P - why is one illegal....? (Score:4, Insightful)
I download a file on P2P, I listen to it three times, decide it's crap and don't bother to buy a copy - that's illegal...?
Am I the only one who sees the hipocracy here?
Maybe the RIAA will sue Microsoft but I'm not holding my breath. The last thing the RIAA wants is somebody to actually go to court and fight their trumped up charges.
Parent
Re:fool me once... (Score:5, Insightful)
The **AAs love how people think that they're law enforcement. They encourage people to think that by wearing those stupid "FBI" knockoff "**AA" windbreakers.
Parent
Re:fool me once... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Considering the RIAA has no law enforcement powers...I'd just shut the door in their face after telling them to get the fuck off my property.
Re:fool me once... (Score:5, Informative)
Umm... Well, its no big deal with Apple because they don't put any DRM on any MP3s and never have.
Their iTunes AAC files (which you purchase from their site) do have fairplay DRM on them but MP3s they are not. They are a completley different file format and are a different beast when it comes to lossey codecs.
You can rip CDs all day long with iTunes to MP3s or AACs (I don't know why you would want to rip to AAC but you can) and not get a bit of DRM on those files.
Heck you can even rip to Apple Loseless mp4 without DRM. Its just that only quicktime, iTunes, and iPods only have the patent codec for them, but I can share a MP4 with my friends all day long and they can make copies and put it on their iPods if they wanted.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:fool me once... (Score:5, Insightful)
From the articles I've read so far (TFA for this story has been Slashdotted), it sounds like Zune will add DRM to files that are wirelessly shared with other Zune players, not to the DRM-free files you transfer from the Zune software (WMP 11?) to the Zune. Adding DRM to your shared, but intitially DRM-free, files may sound like a crap move, but do you think any player (including the iPod) can get away with allowing direct player-to-player copying without adding DRM? This would be similar to file "sharing" like P2P, but on a smaller scale. In the paranoid RIAA's eyes, people could be adding copyrighted music to their players even if they didn't own the original CD.
But can you make a direct transfer from iPod to iPod? Can you easily transfer a DRM-free MP4 file from your iPod to all of your friends' computers? I'd be surprised if the RIAA allowed this.Parent
Contributory and Vicarious Infringement (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Contributory and Vicarious Infringement (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft would not be doing anything wrong.
You know 'wrong' and 'illegal' are not synonyms, right?
The person who distributes the CC-licensed work would be breaking the terms of the license...
The contributory copyright violation in the grokster case was that they knew or expected that people would be using their technology to violate copyright and made a profit off of it. MS is in exactly the same boat. making three copies of a song for random people in a wireless net is almost certainly illegal copyright violation and MS is making money facilitating it. Take em to court RIAA!
Parent
Re:Contributory and Vicarious Infringement (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh the sweet irony, indies hitting MS with the exact same argument the RIAA used against Napster & Grokster.
"Your honor, the federal courts have upheld that despite the substantially non-infringing use of a system, a companies encouragement of people to trade music files makes them accountable for the infringement of their clients.(re Napster & Grokster) We understand that the defendant is claiming that their distibution method of wrapping files in DRM & time limiting usage makes the action fall under fair use, however we humbly direct the courts attention to the [insert number of CC songs available] songs liscensed for distribution under the Creative Commons liscense. The actions of the defendant place their users in direct violation of the terms of this liscense, and as such, MS, by encouriging the users of Zune products to violate the liscense - and thus copyright law as they no longer have a legal copy of the music, is a direct contributor to the copyright infringment of it's users. We feel that the damage done to our clients reaches into the $[asshat number with no relationship to reality] and so ask MS to pay them $[even higher number] to cover our clients losses, their emotional distress, and legal fees. We additionally request an injunction prohibiting MS from further enabling this gross violation of copyrite law."
The beauty of that is that the CCL makes it absolutely clear that you are making your own copy only by accepting the conditions of the CC liscense. If you violate the liscense, you have just surrendered your right to continue owning the music you already downloaded. This is unlike the music industry that plays the "it's a product - wait, no, it's a liscense game". Here you clearly make & own your own copy under a liscense. Violate the terms of the liscense & you void your right to own the copied work => destroy the work or be in violation of copyright. I don't see MS touting this fact while they run around promoting Zune.
Parent
Re:Contributory and Vicarious Infringement (Score:5, Informative)
I guess we just need a load of CC-licensed artists to form some kind of Association and pool their resources. I look forward to the first case being filed!
Don't hold your breath. My interpretation of MS's press release is that Creative Commons music will not be shared at all unless they are selling them through MS's online store and authorize it by opting in. Songs you rip yourself will not be sharable. This seems to be purely a marketing feature to advertise songs you bought to others and get them to buy them when they stop playing after 3 days. It will only work for songs bought from MS's store and whose publishers specified it to be sharable/advertising enabled.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That business model look a lot like the business model of mobile ring tone and games. You may wonder ( I wonder ) who send an SMS to an obscure service for 2$ and only receive a stupid ring tone. But that kind of service is very *very* profitable.
Do not overestimate people reaction against DRM. People bought DVD long before it was cracked and even now most people buying a DVD don't care about t
Re:Contributory and Vicarious Infringement (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Sued for millions!! Class Action!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
It's quite sad that you guys are calling for lawsuits that would result in one of two things: 1. Removing the sharing feature altogether (many of you would love that just to stick it to MS, but you'd be screwing over Zune's users in the process); 2. much more likely, MS would just add a disclaimer telling the user, "The sharing feature is NOT to be used to share CC files" (like the various DVD/CD copying pro
Re:Sued for millions!! Class Action!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
They're called statutory damages. You know, like the RIAA sues for. You don't think they are claiming that the damage to them caused by someone uploading a single song is really $150,000 do you?
Ah, just like that disclaimer (almost verbatim) protected p2p vendors from getting their pants sued off. Oh wait: it didn't. Oh well, maybe MS need to just obey the law that they're so keen on getting others to obey.
Parent
Re:Chinese Translation analogy (Score:4, Interesting)
Is Zune the problem, or the guy who put the CC file on his Zune player?
So who broke the law, the guy who translated it, the guy who paid for the translation, or the guy who bought the translation.
Parent
Take that back (Score:5, Funny)
This story should be pulled immediately! Slashdot does not tolerate cheap shots towards Microsoft
Licensing is to IP (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know if Microsoft is liable here... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't know if Microsoft is liable here... (Score:4, Funny)
CC licenses blur that line considerably. All of a sudden, you grant almost free usage of content to your audience. The copyrights you retain are essentially non-existant. When you declare terms of use, you start peeling that freedom back again, blurring the line further. If the CC guidelines state that no electronic blocks (DRM) may be attached to the content, how do you reconcile that with the fact that computers and the internet are not universally available and present themselves as implicit content locking mechanisms (you can't access these electronic files without also getting online)? The entire act of creating digital content means that the content is restricted to only those who can gain access to it.
The CC license requirement against DRM is non-sensical because the content itself, at the source, is never out of reach from those who would be interested in it. The DRM is just another mode of distribution, like tissue paper or papyrus. It may not be the optimal method of information transfer, but it's better than nothing.
Parent
Re:I don't know if Microsoft is liable here... (Score:4, Interesting)
I see you've been modded funny. I hope that you were trying to be funny, because if this was a serious argument, it is astoundingly ineffective. If I grant you a license to my copyrighted work with the only restriction being that you are not allowed to copy it onto papyrus, you are bound by that term if you accept the copy. The only thing I can't do is restrict non-infringing copying or statutory fair uses, because Title 17 doesn't give me control over those in the first place. Other than that, I can pretty well impose whatever restrictions I like, let them be ever so arbitrary, silly and/or useless. "The work was readily available," is not an excuse.
As for the argument that being electronically encoded is itself an "implicit content lock," I invite you to convince a court that your ludicrous definition is correct. You could just as easily argue that writing in English is an encryption because not all people are literate in English, and you would be just as wrong.
Parent
Does it really wrap non-WMA files? (Score:4, Interesting)
Does it really do that? Anyone have a source?
Re:Does it really wrap non-WMA files? (Score:5, Informative)
The original source quoted is Forbes Magazine's article with direct quotes from Microsoft spokespersons, however, in reading that article [forbes.com] it seems to me to imply that only a subset of songs bought from MS's version of the ITunes store will be available for sharing and it implies that any other music simply won't be able to be shared at all, including Creative Commons works, although the wording lends itself to ambiguity.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
From that article:
Doesn't really sound like a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
As for the CC-licensed content, the original data is still available, unhampered by DRM.
It's unfortunate that the link to the previous analysis is broken in the article. For something like this, it really helps to have more facts.
Who is liable? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Who is liable? (Score:5, Funny)
You must be new here.
Parent
Such a crazy story (Score:5, Insightful)
How many people will buy a zune ?
Ok of those select few, how many have CC content they are or were planning to put on the zune ?
Is anyone's hand up? Furthermore, it would be the end users that would violate the CC license, not microsoft. I can violate the licence today with Microsoft Media Player. Why doesn't CC sue microsoft for allowing users to violate the licese that way? Zune just makes it easier to violate the licese CC doesn't have a say and doens't ahve a leagal leg to stand on. The whol anti DRM thing on slashdot has gotten way out of hand. There are many artists who awnt this kind of protection for their music. They are stuggling to make ends meet and tak to fans who tell them they burned copies of their cd's and gave them to all their friends. These bands are on INDEPENDANT labels, not covered by RIAA. Its an option, let people choose to use it or not use it. Microsoft added a feature that previously didn't exist amoung mp3 players and wanted to make sure that no one used it to violate the artists rights. It just means that you will have to distrubute CC licences files some other way, possibly the same way you are doing right now!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Ok of those select few, how many have CC content they are or were planning to put on the zune ?
Is anyone's hand up?
You could have got the same result in less time by not asking the second question...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Marketing tool not Listener tool (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine a bunch of kids at school. The first one buys a track from the Zune store, shares it around to all his/her friends, creates interest in the cool tune. And then *poof* the music vanishes. So what do all the friends do? The head off to the Zune store to buy buy buy.
From that perspective the feaure makes a great lot of sense.
How about when someone manages to kill the DRM? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's gonna take some lawyers... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm now of the belief... (Score:3, Interesting)
On the other hand, someone will find a way to hack a better , more open OS onto it, using it's hardware capabilities. And they will have a hit.
Or MS will abandon it and whoever is doing the OEM manufacture of the hardware will sell it to a company wiloling to put an open OS on it.
I can always dream and hope.
We are... (Score:4, Funny)
Microsoft *had* to use this DRM.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft would have been guilty of enabling illegal file sharing/IP theft without this DRM wrapper.
Technically so long as they let users share any music they uploaded without restriction or monitoring, MS could probably have walked on this without ever losing a case. They would, however, have pissed off their RIAA partners and it would have made the Zune less profitable for advertising research. Also, it would have de-motivated purchases from their online store, since users could just share music includ
MS screws up a good idea again (Score:3)
I suppose it's to be expected, these are the same people that went out of their way to store Media Center files in a proprietary format making it almost impossible to watch on Linux or just about any other computer. What a shame.
Copyright Violation? (Score:3, Funny)
Perhaps I could then send a legal blackmail letter to microsoft offering to settle for $3700 and if they don't accept, I can recover up to $150000 for each violation? Regardless of what the actual loss is, it seems the precedent set by the RIAA would declare that each copyright violation for a song is worth more then actual damages.
Inflammatory title... (Score:3, Insightful)
The Zune is an inanimate object. It isn't doing anything. It allows the USERS to share music in a DRM'd format. It is the user's responsibility to know that THEY are violating CC by distributing a piece of media with out complying with that media's license.
-Rick
Re:ok so? (Score:4, Interesting)
Let me give you an idea of what my Minidisc life was like for about 5 years:
The device is capable of so many uses. You can record, you can play, you can run with it, you can hook it up to a million sound systems, etc. etc. etc. But the software is designed with keen observation from the lawyers in the company. Many of the features that you, in your sweet heart, KNOW are there are disabled. Recording and then copying are severely restricted. Getting music onto the damn thing takes the effort equivalent to climbing a mountain.
Long story short, it's a gallant horse with strong legs in a tight and painful harness. Severely limited in its movement, the animal withers.
The wireless component of the Zune give it immense potential to dethrone the Ipod. But, we all know that DRM and MS's history will give us a scenario much like the one I consistently experienced as a Minidisc fan.
That's why I have an Ipod.
Parent
Re:Hrm. I guess I would never use the WiFi (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.zuneinsider.com/2006/09/answers_to_som
Here's what he says in answer to a question about this:
"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. 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. And besides, she'll come see you three days later. . "
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Say the software wraps it in nice DRM packaging, which goes against your 'rules' for use of the music. Since the Zune did this automatically, acting on the behalf of Microsoft, which it was designed to do..wouldn't this mean you could sue them just as hard as they sue people that share music / reverse engineer software?