Everybody: 1, DRM: 0
It’s not often you get to break the story on industry-shaking news that might well undermine the business models of some of the biggest and most powerful names in digital media. The bit I wrote up today on FairUse4WM will have massive, broad reaching implications for companies of the ilk that buy Super Bowl ads — not to mention the largest software company in the world. How will Microsoft react? Well, it’s easy to assume they’re on red alert right, since now they have to worry about cleaning up the DRM Valdez — and certainly it’s not as though they can just issue a defensive patch a la Apple and the iPod after Hymn, Harmony, Navio, etc. Why? Because there are hundreds of PlaysForSure device by various companies worldwide. Part of me wonders if this will knock PlaysForSure off the market for good, because this is going to be a blow severely difficult to come back from once the labels find out that the software securing their precious media is trivially and instantaneously breakable.
Co-founder of 
I don’t think it will knock PlaysForSure from the market – but it will start a DRM war between software like this and the media companies.
First of all, love the Valdez comment.
Secondly, congrats on breaking this one. This is obviously going to be a huge deal for MS in the near future. DRM has always been one of those things that we all sorts got used to, like “well, they all have their drawbacks, but hey, it’s all we’ve got right?” I can’t believe someone just blew the doors off of this one. I think that if/when they get this shut down, they’re going to have a P2P software kind of problem on their hands. There’s always a ton of guerilla efforts out there trying to take a chunk out of MS’s earnings, so I think they’re going to have to have to find many fingers to put in the proverbial dike.
Good luck with that guys.
Thanks! Yeah, the thing here is that the PlaysForSure ecosystem is so huge that once you circumvent its copy protection, it seems nearly impossible to close it all back up again. Besides the numerous service providers, you’ve just got too many devices to patch with a new DRM scheme… Microsoft is going to have a hard time with this one, but if they’re smart and forward thinking — and I mean really forwarding thinking — they’ll suck it up and stick it to the labels when the axe falls, and tell ’em to just live with it. Not likely they’ll admit ”defeat,” but it’s what I’d like to see anyway.
Well done on breaking such a huge story Ryan! I can see this having really wide implications in the way subscription based music is sold, prehaps to the point of there being no more ‘all you can eat’ music services any more. As you say now that the floodgates have been opened, patching every device will be just about impossible. I will watch with interest as the labels, Microsoft and the music sites try to come up with a solution. This may be the end of the ‘drm era’.