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PlaysForSure is GoneForSure E-mail
by Stephen Withers   
Friday, 14 December 2007
Microsoft's PlaysForSure logo program is dead and buried. Designed to assure consumers of compatibility between music players using the company's DRM scheme and tracks purchases or rented from online stores, PlaysForSure has been moved into the Certified for Windows Vista program.

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Ah, right...

Given that the customer may have no interest in Vista, this sounds sure to cause confusion. If you want to buy a new computer that'll run Vista nicely, maybe you would look for the Certified for Windows Vista label. Or if you're buying software to run on that shiny new Vista system. Or if you want to be confident that a new peripheral will work.

If you're looking around for a new supplier of music for the player you bought last year, what does Certified for Windows Vista mean to you? Not a lot.

But what do you expect from a company that released Zune, a music player and store that wasn't interoperable with PlaysForSure products?

Perhaps the industry deserves all it gets. If DRM hadn't been foisted on music consumers, we wouldn't need to worry if store A's content would work on manufacturer B's player.

Remember CDs? Real CDs, that is - not the discs that have been deliberately malformed with copy protection so they can't legally be described as CDs.

The great thing about CDs is that you don't have to worry about compatibility of discs and players. Everything just works. That's what I call 'plays for sure.'

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