Some time ago I speculated that one of the reasons for pushing for the analog hole legislation is because they don't want to have to compete against amateur production.
The recently-announced Microsoft Zune player pretty much does this for music.
You can put your own music on the Zune, but it will automatically mark your work as "3 days / 3 plays" when you send it to someone. Yes, your own, original work, the sweat of your brow, made ephemereal by a gadget you thought was supposed to make your life better.
If you want your music marked as anything other than this, you'll need what is effectively a union card from the incumbent music industry.
Answers to (some) of Your Zune Questions "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.
As Boing Boing points out, this also violates Creative Commons licenses. The problem is that CC licenses prohibit this. What's more, CC licenses are machine-readable and could, theoretically, be detected by Microsoft, if they cared enough about copyright to ensure that they were adhering to the license policies set out by creators.
Of course, the difference is that tools to mark files with CC licenses are available to all creators, including the smallest ones.
Finally, it's been noted that the device won't even play Microsoft's own Play for Sure music, but that's more utterly silly than actually pernicious.
⇦ Rather pointless exceptions | ⇨ Zune links |
