“Avoid,” is my general message. The Zune is a square wheel, a product that’s so absurd and so obviously immune to success that it evokes something akin to a sense of pity.
The setup process stands among the very worst experiences I’ve ever had with digital music players. The installer app failed, and an hour into the ordeal, I found myself asking my office goldfish, “Has it really come to this? Am I really about to manually create and install a .dll file?”
But there it was, right on the Zune’s tech support page. Is this really what parents want to be doing at 4 a.m. on Christmas morning?
That might not be Zune’s fault. After about a year of operation, it’s almost as if a Windows machine develops some sort of antibodies that prevent it from recognizing new hardware. But what’s Microsoft’s excuse for everything else?
I can’t believe Tim Lee hasn’t posted about this already, but the Copyright Office has released its list of new exemptions to the DMCA. All around they’re pretty good considering how stingy the Copyright Office has been with exemptions in the past. Missing, of course, is an exemption that would allow folks to format-shift their DRMd DVDs or CDs onto other devices like PCs or iPods. Derek Slater has a round-up of reaction from around the web.
Notable among the exemptions is one for locked cell phones. Wireless carriers will subsidize your phone purchase, but the phone you get is locked so you can only use it on one network. This exemption will now allow consumers to take their locked phones to a competing network who I’m sure will be happy to unlock it for them. On the surface this is great for consumers, but I also wonder what impact it will have on carriers’ willingness to subsidize phones. On the margin, at least, their incentive has shrunk. If that’s the case (and allow me to be a geek for a moment) then it might help Apple’s assuredly forthcoming iPhone better compete since many believe that it will be sold unlocked and without attachment to any carrier.
Today, AEI is launching a brand new magazine titled The American. It’s a bimonthly print magazine combined with a website at American.com. The website is edited by David Robinson, who TLF readers last encountered in July, when I quoted his musings over at Ed Felten’s blog. Robinson asked me to do an article on Zune and the DMCA as one of the inaugural articles on the website:
After the release of its Zune media player last Tuesday, Microsoft faces some awkward questions about compatibility. For the last two years, Microsoft has promoted a digital music format called “Plays for Sure,” which it licenses to other companies that want to build their own player devices or music stores. But Zune uses a brand new and incompatible system. Consumers who purchased music in the “Plays for Sure” format won’t be able to play it on their Zune devices. Microsoft may get extra flack for locking its own loyal customers out of a previous version of its product, but walls between digital music platforms have a long history. “Plays for Sure” music and the new Zune format have always been incompatible with Apple’s wildly popular iPod, and with the iTunes music store.
Compatibility issues didn’t always plague the music industry.
You might think those compatibility problems would represent a market opportunity for third-party software developers. But copyright law stands in the way. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), enacted in 1998, prohibits “circumvention” of copy protection such as that found in Microsoft and Apple’s music formats. The copy protection gets called digital rights management (DRM). Format-conversion software is, in most circumstances, illegal unless authorized by the company that created the format. Hence, the DMCA gives software companies a legal tool to bar competitors from building products compatible with their own, promoting the balkanization of the digital media marketplace into a cacophony of mutually incompatible formats. Not only does that inconvenience consumers, it also reduces intra-platform competition and effectively locks small entrepreneurs out of the market for media hardware and software.
I think the magazine itself sounds like an exciting project. As their about page describes it, The American is “a magazine of ideas for business leaders. Modeled on Henry Luce’s original vision for Fortune Magazine, it surveys the full scope of American life through the lens of business and economics.” Check it out.
The New York Times has an article on the Zune that puts DRM issues front and center:
Rather than selling songs in a closed-file format like Zune or FairPlay from Apple, eMusic uses the MP3 format, which works on all devices. Though dwarfed by iTunes’ 72 percent market share, eMusic’s 10 percent share (as measured by the research firm NPD Group) beats all other stores, including Napster, Rhapsody and Wal-Mart. And eMusic might do even better if it offered songs from the four major record labels–EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner–that control about 75 percent of the music market.
Aside from some small experiments, the majors do not use the MP3 format because it lacks the digital rights management, or D.R.M., technology that protects copyrighted works by preventing unlimited duplication.
It’s great that they’re putting the spotlight on the problems created by DRM, but that last sentence is highly misleading. It’s true that DRM is intended to prevent unlimited duplication, but it seems to be stretching the truth to flatly state that it succeeds in doing so. At best, I think you could say that it slightly delays unlimited duplication because it sometimes takes a few hours before someone goes to the trouble of cracking their copy and uploading it to a peer-to-peer network.
Tim, Steve and others go after me below in an interesting exchange on compatibility and standards. I thought I’d start a new post on this to highlight this exchange and let people really sink their fangs into me since I’m taking the provocative position (at least for this board) that everyone is blowing these compatibility and DRM issues a bit out of proportion. Specifically, in my response to Tim’s “DRM Train Wreck” post below, in which he bemoaned the lack of file compatibility in the digital music world, I argued:
“Could it not be the case that THE LACK OF compatibility between players and file formats actually encourages MORE innovation and competition in some ways? I fully know, for example, that it is impossible for me to play my Xbox games on my PlayStation console or a Nintendo console. Would we be better off if perfect compatibility existed among all the games and consoles? Would 3 major gaming platforms exist at all if we could simply play all game titles on just one of those boxes? I doubt it. I think it would be more likely that only one console would prevail and the other two would disappear. And I think that would leave us worse off as a result.
Same goes for music players, in my opinion. I fully know that I can’t play all my WMA files on an Apple Ipod. But that keeps me (and millions of others) buying non-Apple players. As a result, there’s a fairly diverse and growing market of Apple competitors. Would all those competitors be viable if we could all just play our digital music on an Ipod? Again, I wonder.”
Tim responded that he “[didn’t] understand why incompatibility would cause more competition.” And Steve, one of our most frequent and thoughtful commentators here on the TLF, responded that I am “overlooking a critical point concerning incompatibility” regarding “unintentional” vs. “intentional” variations thereof.
The hosts seem surprised that you can’t email or download music from a server. And they’re not impressed with the “clunky” design of the Zune. “Why don’t they get some decent design people?” Miles O’Brien wonders.
From my perspective, though, the most interesting comment was when Andrew Ross Sorkin emphasizes that “If you have bought songs on iTunes, on Apple for example, it doesn’t play here. And even worse, if you bought songs on Napster or some of the former Microsoft-compliant devices, it also doesn’t work here. So you have to start your library all over again, unless you have it all on CD to begin with.”
Gigi Sohn has a rebuttal to the Cary Sherman’s article on the Digital Freedom campaign, which I criticized earlier this week:
The collective amnesia the entertainment industry has about its past and recent attempts to limit consumers’ rights and technological innovation is nothing short of startling. Beginning with the piano roll at the start of the 20th century, continuing with radio, TV, the VCR, MP3 players and digital video recorders (remember Replay TV?), entertainment companies have tried either to legislate or litigate innovative new technologies out of existence.
Today in Congress, the recording industry is going after the digital audio devices, arguing restrictions are needed to prevent “theft.” But given that there’s no way to take music off of digital receivers, where’s the theft? It’s in the industry perception that if you can legally record music and can organize that music as you wish, then you won’t buy the CD.
As if their legislative campaign was not enough, the record companies are suing XM Radio because it permits consumers to easily record the music they pay for, and Hollywood is suing Cablevision because it provides a TiVo-like service in which the programs you choose to record reside on its servers. Even though the unanimous Supreme Court victory in the Grokster case gives the entertainment industry even more tools with which to fight real copyright infringement, it continues on a legislative and litigation strategy intended to limit lawful activities.
I think it’s important to keep in mind this history when debating present-day entertainment industry efforts to ban devices they perceive as piracy-promoting. They present their proposals as common-sense efforts to control piracy, but they said the same thing about their efforts to outlaw the VCR and the MP3 player. Their efforts to ban XM receivers with record functionality isn’t an anomoly–this is their knee-jerk reaction to every new media technology that comes along.
There is an absolutely intriguing discussion going on over on the Second Life blog today about a new threat facing this popular virtual reality world. (If you are not familiar with Second Life, see this Wired magazine “travel guide” for this virtual world.)
It seems that Second Life users are growing increasingly concerned about the spread of a program or bot called “CopyBot,” which allows the instantaneous and perfect reproduction of virtual objects / property created inside of Second Life. As Daniel Terdiman points out over on CNet News.com today: “That includes goods such as clothing that people purchase for their in-world avatars, and even the virtual PCs that computer giant Dell announced Tuesday it is going to sell in the digital world.”
The folks at Linden Labs, creators of Second Life, posted a note about all this entitled, “Copyrights and Content Creation in Second Life.” It does a lousy job of trying to explain how copyright law works in the real world but suggests that Second Lifers who feel they have been wronged might want to look into how the DMCA could help them out. The post goes on to note that:
Gary Shapiro has commented on my recent post about the Cary Sherman article. He posted the full text of the 2002 speech from which Cary Sherman plucked a few words to quote. It’s worth checking out.
This is an impressive exercise in issue-dodging on the part of the RIAA’s Cary Sherman:
The “Digital Freedom” campaign claims that the entertainment industry’s goal is to “outlaw new digital technology and devices.” This kind of knowingly false and incendiary rhetoric is designed to distort the issue and thwart solutions by demonizing us. The fact is, we are not only music fans, but technology fans, too. We celebrate advances in technology and recognize the importance of finding new ways to deliver content.
Instead of redefining fair use to promote a short-term free-for-all, let’s embrace the existing concept to allow for long-term growth of technology, while valuing and protecting the content it carries. That benefits us all.
Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems to me that this is an example of “outlawing new digital technology and devices”–in this case, satellite radios with record functionality. Yet, Sherman manages to write more than 800 words without even mentioning satellite radios. In fact, I don’t think he mentions any of the policy debates that have occurred since the Grokster decision. It’s as if the RIAA just laid off all of its lawyers and lobbyists in the summer of 2005, and for some reason, that darned CEA just keeps picking on them for no apparent reason.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.