Zune's "community building" features are turning out to be a bit anti-social. Zune has long been rumored, and yesterday confirmed, to have the ability to share music via a wireless connection. It's also long been assumed that music files for the Zune, purchased from the Zune media store, would be crippled in some way before being shared, in order to placate the major labels demands for so called copy protection. As it turns out, this wrapper will be applied to any file shared, not just files from Zune's proprietary online media store.

While restrictions on sharing files are almost certainly required to gain the blessing of the RIAA member labels, this poses a significant problem for many independent musicians who do want you to share and listen to their music. Many independent musicians use the Creative Commons family of licenses, which explicitly prohibit the application of DRM.

According to Medialoper, "What Microsoft has created is a new form of viral DRM. Zune will intentionally infect your music with the DRM virus before passing it along to one of your friends. After three listens the poor song dies a horrible DRM enabled death. Talk about innovation."

This is exactly the kind of crippling, anti-consumer "feature" I've been warning of as the lead up to Microsoft's new device warbled on.

[Medialoper via Slashdot]