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MS Palladium Technical Talk at Harvard
An anonymous reader writes: "On December 4, John DeTreville from Microsoft Research will give a technical presentation about Palladium, Microsoft's Digital Rights Management effort. The talk is open to the public and is a good chance to ask questions."
1. How does Microsoft plan to allow non-proprietary Operating Systems access to Paladium media?
It's not clear what you mean by Palladium media. If you read the linked article, you see that Palladium has four components. None of them refer to Palladium media per se.
What they do have is attestation, which lets a remote server reliably determine that you are running WMP or some other DRM compliant software before you download. Then WMP can enforce whatever restrictions are specified in the data file. So you could call the media supplied by such a server "Palladium media", and chances are that no, the server won't give you the data if you're not running Palladium - but that's entirely up to the server operator. You can't force him to do what you want, and you can't fool him, thanks to Palladium.
2. Why would consumers want to purchase your product that removes rights they have over their own media?
Now, this doesn't make sense. It's not their own media! The data is on a server belonging to someone else. Palladium gives that server owner more information in deciding whether to let you download it. It allows the server to make sure you're running some software that will follow certain rules. If not, it won't give you the data.
So nobody is taking away rights over your own media. Anything you have today, you can continue to use. What Palladium does is let people decide whether to give you their media, and to do so only if you in effect agree to follow their rules.
In answer to your question about why consumers would want to purchase Palladium computers, the answer is obvious. Server operators won't give the data to people who don't have Palladium. So owning a Palladium computer will be the only way to get entertainment media in the future. Nobody's going to force you to buy one. But some (not all) content creators will refuse to give their content away unless you are running Palladium so that they can be confident that you won't steal their data.