Microsoft’s new mp3-player, Zune, will add DRM to anything you put on it, even if it has a Creative Commons licence that expressly prohibits DRM and states that the work is for sharing freely. A Microsoft employee blogs a response to a question form a user:
“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. There currently isn’t a way to sniff out what you are sending, so we wrap it all up in DRM. We canít tell if you are sending a song from a known band or your own home recording so we default to the safety of encoding. And besides, she’ll come see you three days later. . .
Boing Boing points out that Creative Commons licences are machine readable, so the Zune could in fact easily “sniff out what you are sending”.
