Bill Gates Swears Vow Against 'Son of iPod'

Future Linux-Guru writes "The LA Times is running an article on Microsoft's efforts to preempt any single manufacturer from dominating the online video market. Among the scarier revelations is the development of AACS, a new already approved security system designed to prevent piracy on HD DVDs, which subjects users to forced upgrades." From the article: "Whichever way it shakes out, Gates vows not to play the victim in 'Son of iPod.' After learning a hard lesson in the digital music business, 'we're really having to work more closely with partners in the hardware industry and content industry, to really think through the whole end-to-end experience and make it better,' Gates said. 'That's where we've done our mea culpa. We are fixing that.'"

Comments

Re:The trouble with the black market

[Trelane]

You can complain about copy protection all you want. But you must recognise it is there to cut into black marketeers profits, linux users and other consumers are just the collatoral damage of that war.

Actually, no. Generally, the black marketeers will have either inside sources to the un-DRMed originals, or they will have the resources to break the protection. (Bear in mind that US/Western copyright isn't accepted everywhere (e.g. Iran), and that all it takes is for one entity to un-lock the content for it to be loosed on the black markets!) The best that DRM aims at is keeping the average user from doing what the entity publishing the content (usually the record companies or movie producers) doesn't want them to do. This may be copying to share with a friend, transcoding the DVD to watch on a Palm, or watching the video on a player which hasn't licensed the DRM scheme (for instance, any non-embedded linux, BSD, BeOS, OS/2, Amiga, or other small OS; embedded Linux has at least one legal player you can buy from). Additionally, it has the annoying side-effect of not letting me, for instance, keep my CDs and DVDs in a nice, safe location and storing the actual movies on a big RAID and NFS-mounting them to my notebook or whatever in order to play them (or transcoding and streaming them to my palm).

So actually, the Digital Restrictions being Managed by Apple, MSFT, and the record and movie houses is leveled directly at you, not the black marketeer.