Well, it looks like the Zune is going to give us an interesting conflict: DRM versus the Creative Commons license. From the Creative Commons FAQ:

If a person uses DRM tools to restrict any of the rights granted in the license, that person violates the license. All of our licenses prohibit licensees from “distributing the Work with any technological measures that control access or use of the Work in a manner inconsistent with the terms of this License Agreement.”

Why does that matter? Well, we have to go to the details on how the Zune player will share music over WiFi:

Zune accomplishes this amazingly stupid feat by wrapping shared music in a proprietary layer of DRM, regardless of what format the original content may be in. If Microsoft’s claims are to be believed, this on-the-fly DRM will be seamless and automatic - which must be some kind of first for Microsoft.

What Microsoft has created is a new form of viral DRM. Zune will intentionally infect your music with the DRM virus before passing it along to one of your friends. After three listens the poor song dies a horrible DRM enabled death. Talk about innovation.

This illustrates one of the fascinating little edge cases that DRM runs into. How often will this come up? I have no idea - is there much music under that (or similar) licenses? Probably not that much, but I suspect that there's going to be more of it.

Of course, I also await the obvious bug: some guy gets a song this way, and the protective code wipes his entire library instead of just the one song. Yeah, that DRM sure is adding value.

Technorati Tags: law, license, creative commons