PlaysForSure (or ‘My new reason for disliking DRM’)

One bit of news: I’ve made the switch (after about twelve years) from a Windows based operating system to a Mac, in the form of a MacBook Pro (15″/2.4Ghz). I’ve been playing with it for about a fortnight now, and I’m really enjoying it.

The main thing I’ve been doing over the past couple of weeks has been finding replacement software for everything I’ve had on my Windows machine. For the most part this has been a very positive experience, with most software exceeding my expectations and performing better than that which I’d been accustomed to.

This is not the case however with music subscription services. I’ve recently had the chance to play with the extremely cool Sonos system. Linked up to Napster this will allow you to play just about any music you can think of, streamed over the internet, for a relatively competitive monthly fee. It works perfectly, is brilliant, and demonstrates one direction the distribution of music could well be heading – for the majority of your music to be stored elsewhere. Broadband speeds are now good enough to make this practicable.

I love the service, and I want to use it. But I can’t, because I’m on a Mac. Napster, like every other service I can find, uses what used to be called Microsoft’s PlaysForSure DRM system (different name, same problem).

Surprise, surprise: PlaysForSure and Apple Computers don’t play nicely together.

It’s the same reason I can’t access 4oD, and it’s annoying. Especially when you’ve spent countless hours researching and writing a dissertation on how useless DRM technology is.* The continued use of DRM in this respect (not just by Microsoft) raises questions from a competition perspective, but, given DRM is given considerable protection through EC directives, I would be surprised if it was tackled any time soon.

Anyway, the clocks are going forwards, so I should get some sleep!

* If I get a reasonable mark in said dissertation, I’ll probably upload it in case anyone’s interested (now that’s what you call optimism)!