More on Zune and “Plays for Sure”

David Berlind elaborates on the sticky situation “Plays for Sure” vendors will find themselves in if Microsoft launches a device that isn’t Plays for Sure compliant:

Short term, Microsoft will have something by the holidays that, from a specification point of view, compares tit-for-tat with one or two devices. But Sasse as well as his contemporaries are in denial if they think this isn’t going to impact their business over the long run. Microsoft, of course, has to do whatever it thinks it must do to keep Apple from eating its lunch in the world of multimedia entertainment which is what Apple is doing, at least on some fronts). On the other hand, this is exactly the sort of risk that companies licensing such foundational technologies (as DRM) take when those technologies are proprietary and why, if at all possible, it makes sense to hedge that risk with product R&D around something more open. If I were Sasse, right about now, I’d be picking up the phone and calling Sun to find out more about the Open Media Commons and Project DReaM. It may not be perfect. But at some point, businesses and users need to get a better handle on how much of their strategies, budgets, and their investments in technologies (eg:users buying music) they’re willing to subject to decision making processes over which they have no control (eg: those of the vendors of certain proprietary technologies).

There’s a cruel irony here. I’ve always thought the “plays for sure” label was cynical, given that it prevented consumers from playing their music on the world’s most popular MP3 player. But here we see DRM potentially screwing over not just users, but also companies that foolishly deployed DRM technology controlled by a potential competitor.

I don’t quite understand why Berlind thinks hitching their wagon to another proprietary DRM will help their situation any. It’s not obvious to me why Sun’s DRM is any more “open” than Microsoft’s. If Sun abandons DReaM, they’ll be just as screwed as they will be if Microsoft abandons “Plays for Sure.” What they should be doing is adopting a technology that will work on any music player, no matter which proprietary DRM format prevails in the long run. Fortunately, that technology is available today: it’s called MP3. The nice thing about MP3 is that it works with every device, so you don’t have to worry about market shifts leaving you high and dry.

Of course, the major studios aren’t ready to use open formats yet. But luckily there are hundreds of independent labels out there who I bet would be happy to sign deals with them to distribute their music in open formats. As the long tail fattens those independents will represent a larger share of the music market. And exposing more consumers to the joys of unencumbered music will help to raise pressure on the majors to follow suit.

On a related note, Cory Doctorow notes an amusing possibility:

At a guess, I’d say that it would be very, very hard for MSFT to keep Zune users from faking the contents of their iTunes libraries–I suspect we’ll see the Internet full of hacks to let you pretend to have thousands of songs you haven’t bought, which Microsoft will then thoughtfully buy for you.

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