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Longhorn's Copy Protection Standard
hype7 writes "The Register is reporting that Microsoft have attempted to force a last-minute CD protection standard on the recording industry in order to ship it in Longhorn. From the article: "Any such deal would see Microsoft support 'an industry-wide copy control platform' built in to its next-generation Longhorn operating system, with the computer giant instructing labels that the compatible secure CDs must contain additional multimedia content, such as bonus tracks, 'as a quid pro quo for adding effective [DRM] into the consumer experience'". It looks like everyone except the consumer is going to win on this one - Microsoft controls the secure format, the RIAA gets a secure format, and the consumer loses all their rights for the "quid pro quo" of a bonus track."
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Why do customers want to upgrade to Longhorn? I seem to keep losing reasons, or never had them in some cases.
-b
What if a country who cares about it's citizen's rights (like Germany, where Macrovision is illegal, because it prevents backups) and decides to OUTLAW the copy-protection scheme?
Uh, garage bands that are successfull turn into standard RIAA bands. There's no way to win unless you eventually drop support for the band that USED to be a garage band.
I have several friends in bands, and none of them aspire to be rock stars (at least in public). They understand that they need to keep their day jobs.
However, by buying their CDs and tshirts, you can help them make some cash. Not enough to be famous, but perhaps buying some equipment or a bigger van - or a vacation for their wife who puts up with a lot of crap by being married to a guy in a band.
Really simple what will happen here. Chose M$ longhorn or Linux where none of this BS will reside. With the strides the Linux Desktop will be making, by the time Longhorn comes out, the Linux Desktop will do just about everything you need sans the DRM. I see the RIAA trying to outlaw Linux with something akin the "Induce" act within a few years.
In fact, I'll tell you what: if Microsoft could actually come up with a copy-protection scheme that actually _works_ and actually stops pirates, Microsoft would have my heartfelt gratitude. Speaking as a consumer, and no, I don't work for MS. I'm sick and tired of seeing good games companies going bankrupt, while freeloading cheapskates (some driving SUVs and sports cars) leech their games on P2P.
You're living in a dream world. If people can't get little utilities and general purpose software for free anymore they won't start buying it, they'll stop using Windows. Software companies don't go bankrupt because of piracy. They go bankrupt because their software isn't worth what they charge for it. Sure, people may use pirated copies because the program is useful at the low price point, but almost everybody who pirates software would do without rather than pay for the application they "stole". This mentality isn't limited to "$6000" software as you imply. It's the same for $50 software too. Who has $50 to spend on a silly utility, or a mediocre game? Not many people. $50 is more than a week of groceries for a family of four for most of the world, including in the US.
Games provide a great illustration of this point. Many games these days have an online component. Most online games have an effective copy protection mechanism, and few if any of the online players of these games are using pirated copies. This hasn't stopped the majority of these games from tanking though. The fact of the matter is that most games, even good games, don't do so well, and it's not because of piracy; it's a matter of supply and demand. More and more games come out on the market every year. Supply is infinite in the sense that nobody has the time to play every game that comes out... Yet the price point is fixed. This ensures that only the best of the best games make a signifigant profit. And those games *do* profit, even if there is some, or a lot of piracy. Most game development companies are started out of a passion for games, out of an idea for how to be profitable, which is what feeds the oversupply of games. Once you pass that through the publishing cartel you're guaranteed that many of your favorite development houses are going to go out of business, piracy or no piracy.
What will really happen if Microsoft figures out how to stop piracy once and for all is that people will start using platforms where everything that is non-novel (Office software), or can be written by one guy in less than a week (practially every shareware application released in the last 10 years) is free, or in the case of games, they'll do without for the most part; countinuing to buy only a select few each year and maintaining the current situation.
Unfortunately, virtually any form of copy protection is an added nuissance. A large percentage of the time, people who pirate software have fundamentally fewer annoyances then people who acquired it legally. Thats really backasswards.
Everytime I buy a game, I immediately go out and look for a crack for it because having to throw in it's CD everytime, and sit there and wait while it churns around looking for flawed sectors or what have you is really annoying. Used to be one of the things that made games on the PC so great is that you didn't have those kinds of load times and you didn't have to hunt for a disk. By going out to look for cracks, it exposes me to all kinds of extra piracy potential that normally I wouldn't even be remotely close to.
Same thing with operating systems even, I legitimately own a copy of windows XP pro, but I have a second sort of experiment on computer that I went and got a cracked copy for because I didn't want to have to constantly be dealing with some microsoft hotline each time I changed the hardware. It's over the top and more or less useless. When it finally becomes totally impossible to bypass all this junk, when they've finally totally bolted it down to their ultimate hapiness, guys like us will stay on the old platform for as long as possible and eventually just move off forever.
As for expensive office apps, I just can't justify spending $400 so that I can familiarize myself with them. My workplace totally will pay that amount for their computers, and it's totally advantagous to Microsoft in general if I'm familiar with a product enough to justify spending work's money on it. But if I can't *cough* evaluate it on my own terms, I'll never get to that point.
I think it's in that particular arena overall that open source stands to gain the most from ridiculously overpowered DRM. There are a lot of problem spaces in productivity applications where opensource flounders around because people can play with the commericial stuff for free with piracy, they learn it, head to work with it and buy it there. Forced away from that, those commercial products are going to have significant brain drain slowly over time, leading to less sales at work, and nobody will pay those high prices at home. I think they'll really shoot themselves in the foot here, unless, for example, Office XP Professional becomes $50. If those kinds of high end apps actually had reasonable pricing for the home enthusiast, I'd probably own like 6 major apps as opposed to zero.