More on Vista content protection

Posted by steve on February 13, 2007 |

A bit after my last massive, wall-of-text post about Vista content protection, Wired’s Monkey Bites blog had a few things to say about it as well:

Vista Month: Welcome To The DRM?

It’s a good, short & concise post that pretty much summarizes all the ideas behind Vista’s new content protection scheme without going into too much details. Although the post itself is relative old news by now (not to say that my post isn’t), the comments following the post is most entertaining.

There are quite a few people who swear they’ll never use Vista. Which will most likely be challenged when they purchase their next machine which will inevitably ship with Vista preinstalled. A few said they would rather switch to Linux, and even fewer said they will switch to MacOS. Completely understandable, since you can get Linux distributions for free, and you would have to pay for a new machine to get MacOS.

The number of people who are willing to defend Microsoft on this point is also surprising. While a few valid counter arguments has been made, including that most of these security features are turned on/off depending on the policy of the content provider; the fact remains that the studio has absolute, revocable control over what we paid for.

As history has shown us, it’s really hard to disable or extend pre-existing devices of any sort. For example, add-on drives to enable extra functions in consoles has never really panned out (even XBox 360’s HD-DVD drive is nothing more than offering an value add to watch HD-DVD content. No games will ever come out in that format). Destroying backward compatibility, as some early CD-DRM methods has proven, is also nearly impossible. With all the non-compliant stand-alone HD players out there, it’s hard to say if the studios will ever enforce complete security profiles on HD content.

However, this isn’t about the practical application of such ideals, but the fact that our rights to some degree has been completely taken away by these implementation of technology. If we allow them to get away with it this round, they will make sure it was implemented the “right way” the next time around. That’s an argument that everyone seems to be missing.

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