In a typical press feeding frenzy against the violent insurgency of DRM, the New York Times pretty much threw Zune under the bus yesterday only to try to pull it back.
After Microsft made their announcement this week that the Zune marketplace will soon include monetized video for sale, the New York Times pushed this swill out via their blogsite:
If you like to download the latest episodes of “Heroes” or other NBC shows from BitTorrent, maybe you shouldn’t buy a Microsoft Zune to watch them on.
A future update of the software for Microsoft’s portable media player may well include a feature that will block unauthorized copies of copyrighted videos from being played on it.
NBC Universal is a big fan of copyright protection for their content and their CEO, Jeff Zucker, has been quoted many times recently in the press declaring this. Nonetheless this bold statement by the NYT would have been relevant and proper if only it had been true.
Later in the day Saul Hansell was forced to add this intro to his piece by I assume the NYT lawyers:
UPDATED | 10:25 PM Microsoft has posted an item on its Zune Insder blog related to this. See the end of this post.
Saul’s link through to team Zune Leader Cesar Menendez’s Blog began with this title:
Just So No One Gets the Wrong Idea. . .
where he states:
We have no plans or commitments to implement any new type of content filtering in the Zune devices as part of our content distribution deal with NBC.
We think some folks in the industry were expressing hopes for how the entire industry, not just Microsoft, would come to look at content distribution, and some speculation has ensued. Again, no plans are in place toward this end.
So apparently in their lust to decry the value of DRM, the realities of the content industry and NBC’s right to protect the value of their content, the New York Times mistakenly leveled what many called a serious social charge of crimes against humanity. I call it a product feature pre-announcement.
While NBC Universal and Microsoft’s Zune unit may not have immediate plans to load content filtering into the Zune platform, this un-announcement is an indicator of the complex legal, social and moral currents that swirl around the content protection dialogue. On one hand the New York Times was incredibly mistaken in their article but on the other hand we will more than likely see these kinds of CP implementations throughout the digisphere in the coming years.
Greg Sandoval is obviously a huge fan of QTrax and you are sure to find SongBird running in his system tray. Or not.
It’s funny how a company finally gets a major record label to let them distribute music for free to consumers and the best Greg Sandoval can do is position this lame piece with the exciting and compelling title: “Qtrax finally signs major record label.” It’s almost as though he is passing a kidney stone while composing this article.
You would think that something this revolutionary would be top billing at CNet’s News.com site but not if Mr. Sandoval is leading the press. Free Music=Big Story. Come on CNet loosen up and throw QTrax a bone.
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9937436-7.html?tag=nefd.top
[NOTE: QTrax is a customer of BuyDRM. Don’t hate.]
This just in. Some light humor from the UK. Well-known artist Peter Gabriel is missing his servers containing his “online music empire” after some chaps walked them out of the ISP where he hosts his website.
I have to admit this is an excellent situation where DRM might be helpful. Several large media companies I consult with consider this scenario completely manageable for their remote kiosks which are filled with encrypted media.
IFF only.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/05/peter_gabriel_server_theft/
That’s right I am back. After a long hiatus I have returned to my roost here at The DRM Blog. For the past five seven months I have completely immersed myself in a variety of industry events, customer deployments, new technology analysis and I even bought my dream house in Austin Texas.
For those of you who emailed me asking what was the status here I can only apologize for neglect. It has been a wild 5 whoops make that 7 months and as many of you know I have been busy on the boards and at panels and doing some follow-ups on anti-DRM biased writing. You can imagine how busy I have been with that right? 
Meanwhile I am going to be publishing twice a week to start for now and am looking forward to seeing all of your comments and your faces in person over the coming year. Next up Streaming Media East in New York May 19th-21st.
-Christopher
