Well, get out the lube because Microsoft is about to stick it to all their WIndows DRM ‘partners’.
It what can only be seen as flipin a big bird towards all the customers that bought into the Windows DRM infrastructure MS has excluded support for Windows DRM from their upcoming Zune player. All those tracks/movies you bought from/subscribed to from Napster, Ruckus, Rhapdsody, Yahoo!, Movielink, Cinemanow, Urge, etc., etc., etc. will not play on that Zunerific new device.
This means that if you want to enjoy those items on you shiny new (Brown? What are they smoking?) Zunny you’ll have to buy them all over again. Wow, what incredible huberis.
And since they have two hands, the other big bird is being flipped to consumers. This is what we get for beliving them when they said that Windows DRM was ‘open’ and would be ‘widely supported by a huge range of hardware vendors and service providers.’
But my favorite part is this nugget from Zune architect J Allard:
Lots of DVD ripping software out there that encodes to those formats,
so the most popular formats out there, whether it’s MPEG-4 or H.264,
we’ll support those. So, we really are taking a relatively agnostic
approach to different formats.
Ex-sqeeze me? Did he just suggest that we flaunt the DMCA and rip our CD/DVDs ourselves? Me thinks he is going to get a few calls on this one. 😉