There's an article in the NY Times entitled Want an iPhone? Beware the iHandcuffs which contains the following excerpt

Even if you are ready to pledge a lifetime commitment to the iPod as your only brand of portable music player or to the iPhone as your only cellphone once it is released, you may find that FairPlay copy protection will, sooner or later, cause you grief. You are always going to have to buy Apple stuff. Forever and ever. Because your iTunes will not play on anyone else’s hardware.

Unlike Apple, Microsoft has been willing to license its copy-protection software to third-party hardware vendors. But copy protection is copy protection: a headache only for the law-abiding.

Microsoft used to promote its PlaysForSure copy-protection standard, but there must have been some difficulty with the “for sure” because the company has dropped it in favor of an entirely new copy-protection standard for its new Zune player, which, incidentally, is incompatible with the old one.

Pity the overly trusting customers who invested earlier in music collections before the Zune arrived. Their music cannot be played on the new Zune because it is locked up by software enforcing the earlier copy-protection standard: PlaysFor(Pretty)Sure — ButNotTheNewStuff.

The name for the umbrella category for copy-protection software is itself an indefensible euphemism: Digital Rights Management. As consumers, the “rights” enjoyed are few. As some wags have said, the initials D.R.M. should really stand for “Digital Restrictions Management.”

It's weird to see the kind of anti-DRM screed that one typically associates with people like Cory Doctorow getting face time in the New York Times. DRM is bad for society and bad for consumers. It's that unfortunate that Microsoft is the company that has made one of the bogey men of anti-DRM activists a reality. As Mini-Microsoft wrote in his blog post The Good Manager, etc, etc, ...

In the meantime, I think a positive-because-it's-so-negative result of Zune is that it added fire to the DRM debate

No longer is it a theoretical problem that buying a lot of DRMed music from a vendor leaves you vulnerable if the DRM becomes unsupported or falls out of favor. Thanks to Zune and its lack of support for PlaysForSure. Now even the New York Times has joined the in the rally against DRM.

I have to agree with Mini-Microsoft, this is one of those things that is so bad that it is actually turns a 180 and will be good for all of us in the long run.