James Delahunty
4 Apr 2007 17:53
After Apple CEO Steve Jobs published an open letter on why the music industry should completely drop digital rights management (DRM) protection schemes from music downloads, Microsoft said it would be irresponsible to drop those restrictions completely. The company pointed out how DRM would be vital in services such as subscription services and newer business models.
However, the company does plan to start selling DRM-less music from EMI and other companies through the Zune marketplace. "We've been saying for a while that we are aware that consumers want to have unprotected content," said Zune marketing director Jason Reindorp. He did not give any time frame to expect DRM-less music to be available.
EMI is selling DRM-less tracks at a premium through Apple's iTunes music store. Removing the DRM opens the music to many more portable players and the more tracks that are unprotected, the more level the playing field may get for all online music download stores. "This does open things up a little bit," Reindorp said. "It potentially makes the competition more on a device-to-device or service-to-service basis. It will force the various services to really innovate."
Source:
News.com