Microsoft Prepares Office Lock-in

Posted by michael on Tuesday September 2, 2003 @05:27AM from the stupid-business-lining-up-to-lock-themselves-in dept.

An anonymous reader writes "NEWS.COM has an article describing Office 2003's DRM features for documents. This will not only coerce those running older versions of Office to upgrade, which has been a problem for MS in the last few years, but it will also shut out competing software, such as OpenOffice. Now think about this for a second. Even if the developers of a competing office suite could figure out how to get their software to open an Office 2003 document, doing so would be a DMCA violation, since they'd be bypassing an anti-circumvention device. I certainly hope the OpenOffice team will kick development into high gear. If there was a time we need a viable competitor to Office, it's now."

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It's opt-in! by Eric+Ass+Raymond · 2003-09-02 05:40 · Score: 0, Redundant

Did anyone realize that the use of DRM is opt-in?
You can use it to guarantee that the Excel or Word document you're mailing to your client does not get tampered with. A very worthy feature for law-firms and businesses that prefr to send quotes over e-mail.

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BOO! TERRO
Re:Mostly FUD by grahamtriggs · 2003-09-02 08:28 · Score: 0, Redundant

It all rather depends on where you cache the permissions!

The obvious way of doing it is to tie the permissions to the user account on the machine, in much the same way (although preferably more securely ;-) as passwords, etc. are stored for each user.

So, if you log in to your computer using account XXX, and authenticate to open a document, you can continue to open that document logged in as that user... log in as another user, and it will reqire authentication.