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Nokia's 'Comes With Music' initiative

Yesterday, Nokia announced a new initiative, Comes With Music, that will offer "free" music to purchasers of certain cellphones. It's the first outgrowth of Nokia's Ovi brand, which the company announced earlier this year. It also seems to be the first implementation of Universal's Total Music plan, in which device makers bundle a music subscription on new devices and add the cost to the price of the device, rather than forcing consumers to pay the monthly fee.

As with all such services, the devil's in the details. According to Ars Technica, there's an … Read more

Microsoft licenses DRM technology to Nokia

Yesterday, mobile phone giant Nokia announced it would license PlayReady, a new digital rights management (DRM) technology developed by Microsoft. This is the first win for PlayReady, and represents a pretty major shift for Microsoft.

Until about two years ago, Microsoft's DRM strategy was tied up with the Windows Media platform. Microsoft invested considerable research and development into improving Windows Media DRM. For example, in 2004, Microsoft rolled out a new version of Windows Media DRM that made it viable for content owners to allow music from subscription-based services to be transferred to portable devices. With Windows Media DRM 10, … Read more

Microsoft launches new DRM

Microsoft swam deeper into the murky DRM waters today when it announced a new DRM system at the 3GSM show in Barcelona that will allow users to share protected content between multiple devices. Users of PlayReady would be able to register multiple devices to a "domain" that would act as a forum for that user's content. When a wireless carrier or Internet service provider signs up with PlayReady, its customers could then use PlayReady to purchase content and share it with other domain-registered devices multiple times. Apparently there are no restrictions on what kind of devices you … Read more