Gadgetopia

Zune’s Big Innovation: Viral DRM: Microsoft’s upcoming Zune will DRM your music before you can share it with anyone else, even if the music wasn’t DRMed in the first place.

[…] recipients of shared songs will only be able to listen to them three times or for three days, whichever comes first. It sort of sounds like a really bad tire warranty.

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.