Microsoft’s New DRM

Seems like someone over in Redmond didn’t get the memo. Recent news has corporations, national governments, and citizens alike coming out against the propagation of DRM encoding. It seems that people enjoy being able to, you know, share music. Microsoft’s existing PlaysForSure system just wasn’t cutting it, and they just introduced their new PlayReady technology during 3GSM. Registering purchased and encoded songs to a personalized domain, the system allows the domain owner to sync multiple devices with the same content. Interesting in theory, but practical application and success has yet to be proven. No word on backwards-compatibility with existing encoding (such as PlaysForSure or the Zune proprietary encoding) or whether the domain registration and hosting will run a monthly fee or simply be folded into the purchase costs.

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