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Vista and the Music Industry
BanjoBob writes "Vista locks down all the DRM functionality and actually reduces the quality of playback of some media. This includes both audio and video content. As a company creating music and video products, how can we use Vista to create, distribute, and use legal media? I have read nothing to indicate that Vista has a model to allow 'authorized' use without causing problems. Currently we use Windows 2000 and Linux products. If what we understand is true, Vista and future Microsoft products won't be viable options for us since prior to publication, media must be copied multiple times, edited, moved around, re-edited and often modified into various forms (trailers, etc.) before, during, and after production. This naturally includes backups and recovery. If Vista is intent on prohibiting these uses, then Microsoft is intent on keeping their products out of the realm of content creation and editing. How do others deal with these issues?"
DRM is a just tool for content producers. Unprotected media should be entirely unaffected by it. I'd be surprised if the quality reduction wasn't an opt-in feature that only applies to protected media where the producer chooses to enable it. I haven't used it, but I doubt Vista can or would try to prevent an app from decoding and displaying an unprotected video in full quality.
As a company creating music and video products, how can we use Vista to create, distribute, and use legal media?
You could always buy the development version of Vista. I believe the working code-name was "OSX Tiger".
I am not a sig.
All our high end graphics and compositing moved to Macs from Windows a few years ago and 98% of our daily problems went away. Now, when the artists hear about other people's problems with Windows environments, they consider it an odd duck operating system from Mars. Guess what... it is now. Once you get over the relatively small orientation hump on the Mac, you'll wonder why you wasted your time screwing with Windows for so long.
Most of the stuff on
This problem will be especially pronounced for professional content creators because they're going to have a higher than normal probability of needing to (legitimately) work with protected content -- whether it's their own or somebody else's. Again, this is very unlikely to always happen, but it doesn't take that many 'unfortunate coincidences' to turn your average high-strung artist into a paranoid schizophrenic.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Another good example of DRM being harmful even if you don't enable it actually occurred today in Windows XP on my sister's computer...Apparently the "copy protect content" checkbox in WMP9/WMP10 is automatically checked on install, she'd been ripping all her CD's DRM'ed without even knowing it. Since then she's lost most of the CD's but she was careful to keep a backup of all the music from her hard drive, unfortunately for her, her hard drive died yesterday and when she reinstalled Windows all her licenses were gone, leaving her with about 30gb of useless data carefully preserved on an external drive. Needless to say she was devastated as much of it was content she couldn't get back, just because you can disable DRM doesn't mean it's not dangerous.
You see, modern computers have this thing you may have heard of called multitasking. Inevitably, this will lead to non-DRM content being processed while DRMed content is also being processed. The problem with Microsoft's implementation is that, when this happens, Vista will apply the downgrading of quality to ALL of the output--not just the DRMed content. And don't think for a minute that this will be an unlikely scenario either. Once proprietary software starts putting DRM on icons or splash videos, this type of interaction will become all but inevitable.
Here's the relevant part of Dr. Gutman's paper on this:
-Grym
If you take the time to read Gutmann's actual analysis, rather than just the summary on the Inquirer, you'll note that he gives several reasons to object to Vista's DRM requirements even if you never use a single DRM-protected file. For example:
... all those affect you even if you never sully your system with a DRM-protected file. And that's just scratching the surface. Open source drivers are going to get harder to write; the DRM spec breaks Microsoft's own unified driver scheme, requiring a completely unique driver for every possible variant of every possible device; massively increases the required system specs; decreases system reliability; and on and on. It doesn't even do a damn bit of good in the long run; all it takes is one bright hacker with a compiler (and possibly a soldering gun) to figure out some way around it. One compromised system means that Hollywood's precious copies of Soccer Dog: the Movie will be smeared all over the net. And meanwhile, the rest of us poor schmucks will be paying more for hardware that does less. Great.
The specs for DRM support in Vista specify that the OS has to encrypt any protected video data sent to the video card. "Ah HA," you say. "I'll just never use any protected video." Fair enough. But consider this: in the future, any new video card you buy will have to be capable of decrypting stuff even if you yourself never send it any encrypted content. That means that the company that makes the video card has to integrate cryptography capabilities into the video card. Which requires space on the video card's circuit board. That same circuit board space could have been, say, another pixel pipeline or two for faster video rendering - oh well. Congratulations, you're getting less bang for the same buck.
Except, of course, it's NOT the same buck; it's more buck. Integrating cryptography into a video card will require expertise (expensive), development (expensive), and testing (expensive). And naturally, some cryptography technologies are covered by patents, so the video card company will have to purchase more patent licenses (expensive). Guess who's going to wind up footing the bill for these new expenses? That's right: you, the end user.
Some of the patent expenses can probably be reduced. nVidia has patents of its own, as does ATI, and SGI for that matter. They can offer to swap patent permissions with companies who hold patents for cryptographic technology. (Assuming that the cryptography companies have any interest in graphics patents.) What's that you say? You're a small company? You don't have a massive portfolio of patents to bargain with? And your budget is limited? Sorry, friend, you're in the wrong line of work. Try McDonald's, I hear they need highly-skilled cash-register operators. (Not that there are very many small upstart video-card companies; breaking into that market is damn hard. Throwing in all this DRM stuff just makes the impossible a teensy bit harder.)
Slower development times, higher hardware costs, decreased competition