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:
With the arrival of Microsoft Windows Vista and Intel’s East Fork concept both Microsoft and Intel have however sold out to the music and movie industry and their unbridled greed. Microsoft’s Vista will, amongst other things, feature something that’s called the Output Content Protection, which is a first implementation of the NGSCB, Next Generation Secure Computing Base, the infamous platform formerly known as Palladium. This prohibits the output of protected video content unless you have HDCP, High bandwidth Digital Content Protection, support on your display. Currently a very small percentage, less than 1%, of shipping monitors support this and hence will allow you to view such content....
Intel’s East Fork concept is the proverbial icing on the cake, adding the needed hardware support to supplement the features as found in Windows Vista. And unlike the concept platform Intel has shown us in the past, East Fork will start shipping in the first quarter of 2006, quite in time for the release of Windows Vista. The combination of the two will mean that you, the end-user, will be royally screwed in every way, shape and form. That’s right, once East Fork and Vista ship you can forget about exercising your fair-use rights, no more converting songs to MP3, no more music downloads to- and from friends and family, no more DivX movies, and the list goes on. But more disturbing is the fact that new content will only be able to playback on the new platform, there, for example, will be no (legal) Linux support or support in other operating systems. Simply because any such media player, able to playback this content, will circumvent the protection scheme that is DRM, which is illegal. Basically fair use and your rights as a consumer are out of the window when East Fork and Vista arrive.
