I saw a post over on Bruce Schneier’s blog, titled “DRM in Windows Vista.” Basically, he talks about the fact that DRM has been firmly entrenched in Microsoft’s latest operating system and I have no beef with that – it certainly has! Many facets of Windows were re-written specifically for DRM. Some may say the benefits of the rewrite for DRM are really only side-effects, but that just doesn’t make sense to me.
However, he goes to say, basically, that Microsoft should have just given the entertainment industry the proverbial finger and said “no way” to DRM:
It's all complete nonsense. Microsoft could have easily told the entertainment industry that it was not going to deliberately cripple its operating system, take it or leave it. With 95% of the operating system market, where else would Hollywood go?
Where would Hollywood go? Um, what about stand alone players? I’d say that right now stand alone players account for a good 90-95%† of where people watch DVDs today. And I don’t see why that would change with HD-DVD and Blu Ray.
The real reason‡ for all the DRM is a little thing called “Media Center.” In Windows XP, Media Center was a whole different “edition” of Windows which you purchased with a special “Media Center PC.” Sales of Media Center were apparently pretty slow to start with, but the numbers are picking up. Microsoft are hoping that they’ll become just as common as regular consumer DVD players, and if they can also support HD-DVD (even Blu-Ray if it eventually wins out) then they’ll be golden.
The problem is, if they didn’t build the DRM into Media Center, it would not be able to play HD-DVD which would be a major setback for Microsoft.
I don’t see where Bruce is pulling his “Microsoft want to include DRM in order to lock Hollywood into Windows” stuff from, but it certainly sounds pretty cool. Microsoft would really have to be the Evil Empire to try and pull something like that off. No, I think the real reason is that they want people to actually buy a Media Center PC – because I certainly wouldn’t buy one that can’t play HD-DVD (scratch that, I’m not going to buy one anyway, but I’m not their target demographic :p)
So why don’t Microsoft only include the DRM stuff into Media Center Edition and not Windows Vista “desktop edition”? That’s a good question. It’s true that Microsoft aren’t actually selling a separate “Media Center Edition” anymore, but there’s no real reason they couldn’t. My guess it is about hardware. A monitor that has an HDMI input for high definition cannot accept “high definition” signals over a non-encrypted DVI input††. So that would mean that Windows Vista “desktop” – if non-crippled – would not be able to use one of these monitors. This means that a manufacturer would have to create two version of every monitor, a HDMI and a DVI version.
Better that Windows Vista “desktop” supports HDMI. But in order to do that, the entire pipeline needs to be crippled with DRM. It’s sad, but that’s what the HDMI agreements state.
My hope is that Hollywood wakes up and realises that DRM simply does not work.
† I just pulled that figure outta my arse. But only cause I can’t be bothered trying to figure out the real number. This is a blog post, not an op-ed for the New York Times ;)
‡ Yep, still pulling stuff outta my arse...
†† At the moment, that is not true, but there are provisions in the HDMI agreements that by 2010 (or whatever the date is), HDMI will be the only option for high definition input.