Reading Peter Gutmann's A Cost Analysis of Vista Content Protection (mirror), a missive on DRM in Windows Vista--if you haven't read it yet, go do that now or the rest of this article won't make any sense--got me to thinking. Why is Microsoft going to such lengths to embed DRM so deeply in not only Vista, but the entire PC ecosystem? The obvious conclusion from Gutmann's article is that they're making a power-play for the control over all future content distributions.
This far surpasses their Windows OS monopoly in magnitude, since we're not only talking about main-stream PCs delivered from popular system builders such as Dell, HP, IBM, etc, but it also potentially affects devices in all PC hardware. That means even if you're not Joe Consumer buying a new laptop for Christmas, even if you're a savvy hobbyist building your own system to run a non-Microsoft OS, you're still going to be affected. This move can very potentially have the effect of halting the development of the vast majority of Open Source hardware drivers, rendering future Open Source operating systems useless.
In actuality it's worse than that, because Microsoft is betting that their OS is going to be used for the rapidly expanding Home Entertainment market as the software that controls set-top boxes for everything from cable, to video playback, DVRs, streaming audio, etc. Even that isn't the end of it. Microsoft wants their OS in tablet PCs used by medical workers and other traditionally non-IT personnel, and on your mobile devices, both PDAs and phones.
Are we starting to see the problem here? If Microsoft can dictate how hardware must be designed for every device a consumer will ever touch, and they do it in such a way that it's impossible "for security reasons" for anything less than a major corporation to gain access to the hardware specs and documentation necessary for drivers. What do you think will happen to the price of consumer hardware and software under these conditions?
Major hardware vendors are already warning of major price increases in consumer hardware due to the overbearing burden of meeting Microsoft's requirements for Vista and the hardware vendors certainly aren't going to swallow those costs. They're going to pass them on you to you and me. What we have is the literal definition of a harmful and anti-competitive monopoly, yet it's being allowed to happen despite a long string of judgements by several governments against Microsoft for much less ambitious plots.
Is it really just Microsoft, though? They're the easy target right now, but none of this would even be an issue if it wasn't for an even more powerful organization: The Entertainment industry.
Just like the Telcom industry, the Entertainment industry is clinging to outmoded and obsolete methods of content sales and distribution. Rather than adopt their business model to the changing technology and consumer demand, they have opted to thrust their content model down the throats of every consumer, ignoring the gagging and vomitting.
Essentially what this industry is trying to do is turn every computer into a RIAA/MPAA-licensed content player (first and foremost, with utility computing being a distant second function), solely to protect the current revenue models of those industries. Is this about enhancing consumer experience? Hell no!!! The entertainment industry doesn't give a shit about the consumer experience, all they care about is protecting their wild profits and exploitative handling of actual content producers.
The industry doesn't want to do any hard work to evolve their business--that would be expensive! Instead they spend a few million buying elected officials in the US and other countries and persuade them to pass asinine anti-consumer legislation like the DMCA, a piece of flaming cow dung that flies in the face of years of legal precedent for "fair use".
Then they go to the computer and communications industries and tell the giants there that they won't get any "premium content" unless they burden their consumers with all kinds of ridiculous restrictions. Oh yeah, but whichever vendors go along with this fleecing scheme will have a leg up on the competition and be able to differentiate themselves. Of course these industries want to deliver this stuff to their customers to continue feeding the upgrade cycle (new software releases that require new licenses, higher bandwidth connections that cost more, etc).
In the process a few clever companies figured out that by being first-to-market and leveraging patents and monopolistic powers, they could dominate the content delivery markets for years to come. Apple was first to realize this and got in bed with the music industry by introducing Fair Play DRM for their iTunes store and a host of artificial restrictions on the usage of their iPod players. Because of the overwhelming consumer-friendliness of the iPods, this model stuck. Now Apple has a monopoly on the personal music player market and they're free to do pretty much anything they want.
At least Apple has to be a little bit careful, though because the cost of entry into the music player market isn't really that high, so Apple can't make things too hard for consumers, or they'll migrate to something that's less restrictive and just play ripped or pirated music and ignore the on-line sales entirely. iPods were never about iTunes, they were about having a better way to take your music with you.
With Vista, Microsoft is making Apple's music restrictions look like kiddy play. While Apple won't let you sync your iPod with multiple machines and you can only play purchased music on a handful of machines, it doesn't affect the rest of your content, let alone the operation on your computer. Microsoft is crippling every function of your machine simply to satisfy the entertainment industry and place monopolistic controls at Microsoft's finger-tips. I'll be blunt: Microsoft doesn't think you should own your computer--they think they should.
That's what is at the very heart of the issue and what makes it so insidiously evil: You no longer Own what you own. If you paid attention to Microsoft license agreements, you never did own the software installed on your machine, but at least you owned the hardware and could decide how you wanted to use your machine and what you could install on it. Now Microsoft wants control over the hardware too. They don't want you to be able to run an operating system other than Windows, because they wouldn't get money for that. They don't want you to be able to use drivers that they don't approve of, because that might allow you to play content that they don't control the licensing for.
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