Songs bought in the MSN Music Shop, which stopped in 2006, when Microsoft launched the Zune Marketplace, will be unusable. The servers handing out licenses will be taken out of action on August 31, 2008. Legally bought songs, will become unplayable neither are they to be played out on Mircosoft’s music player Zune. So, legally bought songs become unusable by a decision of the provider, who also stops the songs from being played on its music machine.
Many buyers will put the question whether Microsoft just can do that. Microsoft used the argument that the songs under PlayForSure was a small group. A rather one-sided decision, as people have paid money to buy the songs and will have to shell out again. Besides the service aspect and respect for customers, it appears that the buyer has no right to th song at all, except the right to buy it over and over agin when the provider changes servers, DRM software or equipment. So the user has a right to a license and not to the song.
The same question plays in the electronic book field. When you have bought an electronic book from Amazon or from Sony, is that book yours and are you allowed to sell the book. Four students from Columbia Law School's Science and Technology Law Review are challenging the legal issues surrounding the purchase of e-books for devices like the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader.
The contentious characteristic of both products is that they bar users from sharing their e-books with other users. Kindle offers a non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy...solely for your personal, non-commercial use." Users may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to...any third party. The Sony Reader has similar, restrictive clauses in its license, but does allow users to copy e-books to several other Readers as long as they are registered to the same account.
For dead-tree book buyers this discussion is strange as they can sell the physical book by putting it on eBay and selling it at any price. This is called the first sale doctrine. Under the US Copyright Act, the first sale doctrine allows the owner of a particular copy of a work to sell, lease or rent that copy to anyone they want at any price they choose. These rights only apply, however, to the particular copy that was purchased; any unauthorized reproduction or copying of that work constitutes copyright infringement.
When it comes to digital works, however, two complications arise: first, consumers might only hold a license to the content, rather than all of the rights that come from a sale of a physical book. It is neither most likely that a user can sell a particular copy as there are many more formats available.
Kindle and the Sony Reader are following this licensing trend and creating restrictive licenses that users must agree to upon using the product. If these agreements are found to be enforceable licenses by a court, they could serve as the legal authority to limit users from selling or otherwise transferring the e-books they download.
While the restrictions on e-books may initially seem inconsistent with the rights granted for hard-copy books, these differences are the consequence of new digital products outgrowing traditional copyright doctrines. Such issues are currently being examined by legal scholars and industry insiders, but only time will tell whether this degree of control over digital media is acceptable to society.
Blog Posting Number: 1084
Tags: e-books, e-reader, right of first sale
Showing posts with label Zune. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Zune. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
Mobile entertainment (2)
Last Monday I visited the symposium on mobile entertainment: now and in the future, organized by students of INHolland College in Haarlem. The audience mainly consisted of students and instructors as well as a few outsiders, a scriptwriter, a blogger of Mobile Dutchcowboys and me.
The program had been built up in two tracks of presentations which were held once. So choices had to be made and by definition four presentations had to be missed. After the introduction, the first selection moment presented itself: a presentation on the network of KPN or a presentation of Microsoft the Netherlands. Both are public companies quoted at the stock exchange, so no real novelties will be told and presuming that the network presentation was going to be rather technical I went to the Microsoft presentation. Perhaps the guy was going to give a reaction on the iPhone.
The presentation was nicely built up with market research data, basically indicating that consumers are going to spend more money on data service and certainly on mobile gaming; $ 722 million in 2006 and $ 1.3 billion in 2010. Mobile will become more interesting for mobile services as everyone is used to a mobile and with the data speed becoming faster and more comparable to the fixed line speeds, mobile data services will become more prominent. But the acceptance will follow the model of business first and then consumers.
For Microsoft this means that it will have to address mobile data services. It means that Microsoft is confronted with multiple form factors of stand alone machines, networked PCs and PDAs. And even in mobile Microsoft has to address mobile multiple form factors with Windows. There are now some 140 devices around, which are moving from a media centric orientation (mediabox for TV) to a voice centric orientation and on to a data centric orientation; let alone the notebooks and tablets. Mobile telephones are moving from talking machines to data machines, from devices with small screens to larger screen.
Microsoft has now a range of mobile software with Windows Mobile, Windows CE (e.g. to be used for the infotainment system in Fiat cars), and Windows embedded. It is clear that Microsoft wants to couple smart mobiles to the net and have the users go through an experience. An example was shown in the presentation. A Silverlight plug-in for the webbrowser combined with Deepfish for the building up the page on a mobile was shown in the example of the major baseball league, including video and audio (see photograph).
In the Q&A session the inevitable question about the Jezus machine of Apple, the iPhone, popped up. Was Microsoft going to follow also that road. The Microsoft presenter offered compliments to Apple, but supposed that Microsoft would not follow the example. In his opinion Microsoft was a platform development company and not a service oriented company. I guess I do not agree with that. It is just that Microsoft is always late and imitates. Microsoft was late in internet browsers; Microsoft was late mobile software; the X-box came after PSP and the Zune followed the iPOD. So one day Microsoft will have a device comparable to the iPhone (famous last words!). I guess that it will be nicknamed the Gates machine.
Blog Posting Number: 803
Tags: mobile entertainment
The program had been built up in two tracks of presentations which were held once. So choices had to be made and by definition four presentations had to be missed. After the introduction, the first selection moment presented itself: a presentation on the network of KPN or a presentation of Microsoft the Netherlands. Both are public companies quoted at the stock exchange, so no real novelties will be told and presuming that the network presentation was going to be rather technical I went to the Microsoft presentation. Perhaps the guy was going to give a reaction on the iPhone.
The presentation was nicely built up with market research data, basically indicating that consumers are going to spend more money on data service and certainly on mobile gaming; $ 722 million in 2006 and $ 1.3 billion in 2010. Mobile will become more interesting for mobile services as everyone is used to a mobile and with the data speed becoming faster and more comparable to the fixed line speeds, mobile data services will become more prominent. But the acceptance will follow the model of business first and then consumers.
For Microsoft this means that it will have to address mobile data services. It means that Microsoft is confronted with multiple form factors of stand alone machines, networked PCs and PDAs. And even in mobile Microsoft has to address mobile multiple form factors with Windows. There are now some 140 devices around, which are moving from a media centric orientation (mediabox for TV) to a voice centric orientation and on to a data centric orientation; let alone the notebooks and tablets. Mobile telephones are moving from talking machines to data machines, from devices with small screens to larger screen.
Microsoft has now a range of mobile software with Windows Mobile, Windows CE (e.g. to be used for the infotainment system in Fiat cars), and Windows embedded. It is clear that Microsoft wants to couple smart mobiles to the net and have the users go through an experience. An example was shown in the presentation. A Silverlight plug-in for the webbrowser combined with Deepfish for the building up the page on a mobile was shown in the example of the major baseball league, including video and audio (see photograph).In the Q&A session the inevitable question about the Jezus machine of Apple, the iPhone, popped up. Was Microsoft going to follow also that road. The Microsoft presenter offered compliments to Apple, but supposed that Microsoft would not follow the example. In his opinion Microsoft was a platform development company and not a service oriented company. I guess I do not agree with that. It is just that Microsoft is always late and imitates. Microsoft was late in internet browsers; Microsoft was late mobile software; the X-box came after PSP and the Zune followed the iPOD. So one day Microsoft will have a device comparable to the iPhone (famous last words!). I guess that it will be nicknamed the Gates machine.
Blog Posting Number: 803
Tags: mobile entertainment
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