DRM, the ugly side

[Phuncz]

While some find it bad enough that Windows XP, its office products and many other third party providers use product activation, apparently product activation may become just a minor issue when consumers find out that their Windows Media DRM protected content can also be affected by hardware changes, such as something as simple as a CPU change. Worse still, if consumers don't backup their licenses (for content that permits the backing up of licenses), the user would have to revert their hardware back in order to play their content again!

Microsoft's DRM also has another recent issue in that the installation of Update Rollup 2 for Media Center 2005 may cause DRM protected content to no longer play, since this rollup updates the OS's DRM. So far they are still working on the problem and the only work around is to recover the licenses as with a hardware change and that assumes the user made a license backup before installing the Update Rollup 2.

Finally, as most are already aware of, DRM is making it an issue deciding between various portable devices and online content download stores. For example, Microsoft, Apple and Sony all have their own proprietary DRM implementations and matching hardware to playback their content, with all three DRM implementations all being incompatible with each other. When it comes to video, both Apple and Microsoft have their own DRM implementations also, not to mention other versions by other providers.

It is interesting to see that Windows Media’s DRM can be locked to a given hardware configuration as according to Microsoft, certain hardware or BIOS changes, such as a new CPU or disabling hyper threading is enough to cause the protected content to fail! What I found odd that Microsoft allows content providers to choose whether they allow their licenses to be backed up, which means that if the provider decides not to allow license backups, the consumer is prevented from upgrading their PC or face losing their purchased content.

At least many other content providers such as iTunes are not locked to the hardware components (at least not that I’m aware of) and most always allow backups to be made, such as for replacing the PC with a new PC or recovering content after a HD crash.

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Mooie evolutie... Doei vrijheid...

[Robbe]

'k ben is curieus hoe de verkoop van diene nieuwe windows zal lopen Een versie zonder foutmeldingen, da kennen ze daar duidelijk ni