Over the weekend, Eric Lai wrote in PCWORLD that Microsoft had decided not to remove restrictions on consumers virtualizing its Vista operating system. The reason given by Lai is that DRM may not work with a virtualized OS.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and Ashley Highfield, the BBC's director of new media and technology did a Q/A at the Mix06 Conference in Las Vegas, this according to an article published on Informitv.com. Topics included DRM. Snippets:
BusinessWeekOnline has an interview with attorney Thomas Vinje, who represents Microsoft antagonists, in which Vinje notes:
In February, ECIS filed a new complaint that accuses Microsoft of trying to extend its dominance via planned new products, such as a new operating system for servers. What does that mean exactly?
What Microsoft is trying to do now is bundle digital rights management products into the operating system. We've seen this movie before. We've seen it with Netscape, with RealPlayer (which lost massive market share after Microsoft bundled similar products into Windows).
Microsoft has 70% of the overall server market, they are certainly dominant. Try selling digital rights management products when there is already a usable one in the operating system.
Continue reading "MSFT, Authentica, and Independent DRM Vendors" »
Writing on HardwareAnalysis.com, Sander Sassen asserts that Microsoft and Intel are acting out of greed in their efforts to secure high definition video and other media content. Greed or smart business? I think the latter.
There is, by the way, nothing inherent in well-implemented rights management that prevents the rules associated with protected content to take into account many if not most "fair use" situations. The question is whether DRM technologies included in and/or layered on top of WinTel's DRM are sufficiently feature rich to enable those with rights in media content to define apparent fair uses, such as backup copies.
Snippets:
According to this worthwhile ExtremeTech article, the Blu-ray Disc Association has settled on its plans for incorporating DRM. Snippets:
eWeek has an article on Intel's increasing support for the Linux operating systems that says:
ASPs (Application Services Providers) are mostly dead having died in the collapse of the Bubble. Well, OK, many are living happy lives at the moment but have eliminated from their names and marketing collateral the term ASP as a way of describing central server-based applications sold on a services model. The new term is SaaS: Software as a Service. Is DRM a candidate for a successful SaaS offering? Maybe. Maybe not. eWeek has an article on SaaSs that addresses this possibility. Snippets:
In an interview given to the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) and described here (no subscription required), Intel's new CEO Paul Otellini says that:
I continue to wonder when the Open Source community is going to take DRM seriously. As near as I can tell, it hasn't happened yet, in part because of their general antipathy towards rights, patents, copyright, and Intellectual Property generally.
Maybe the winds of change--ok, mild breezes-- can be detected. Check out Alexander Grunder's article My Inner Struggle with Microsoft, Linux, and DRM. Snippets:
ABI Research has put out a press release describing their conclusions regarding Automotive Operating Systems. Snippets:
Several news outlets covered today's story regarding Microsoft and Nokia partnering up. Here's one. Nokia will make use of Microsoft's DRM 10. The agreement also indicates future interoperability between DRM 10 and OMA, the standard for mobile phone DRM, giving Microsoft a foothold on the mobile platform.
Brier Dudley has a longish (for a newspaper) article in the Seattle Times that overviews Microsoft's evolving security and DRM strategy. Worth a read.
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