Ditching DRM

You’ve got to feel a little sorry for the Zune team over at Microsoft. The notion of an “iPod killer” may be as tough to sell as a “Windows killer.” They came late to a music player scene that’s already shaken out the weak competitors. They’re pushing Windows Media formats, but people demand MP3 über alles. With Apple’s iPhone mobile media wunderkind announced just before the expected uptick in Zune sales, the timing couldn’t have been worse. To top it all off, reviews of the Zune have mercilessly flogged the almost-cool features crippled by digital rights management (DRM).

DRM has been grabbing headlines of late, not only because of its hindrance to new products and technology such as the Zune — with its three-day self-destruct for wirelessly transmitted music and the slow smothering of the PlaysForSure program — but for DRM’s increasingly apparent general futility. To wit: like every scheme before it, the AACS DRM built into the new Blu-ray DVD format was cracked a few days ago. This, only a month after its sibling HD-DVD fell to a similar technique that extracts encryption keys from the media. As one headline put it, “Blu-ray joins HD-DVD in pile marked ‘owned.’”

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