Microsoft Answers Vista DRM Critics' Claims

skepsis writes "Recently there have been some stories on Slashdot claiming that Vista would downgrade the quality of audio and video for every application in a machine where protected content was running. One of the stories painted a scary scenario where a 'medical IT worker who's using a medical imaging PC while listening to audio/video played back by the computer' would have his medical images 'deliberately degraded.' A post has been put up on the Vista team blog explaining exactly how the content protection works, and it turns out the medical IT staff and audio pros can relax. From the post: 'It's important to emphasize that while Windows Vista has the necessary infrastructure to support commercial content scenarios, this infrastructure is designed to minimize impact on other types of content and other activities on the same PC. For example, if a user were viewing medical imagery concurrently with playback of video which required image constraint, only the commercial video would be constrained -- not the medical image or other things on the user's desktop.'"

Comments

Re:As a consumer, what's in it for me?

[pesc]

You have got it all wrong. Microsoft doesn't regard you (the person who pays for Vista) as a customer. You are the sheep that pays the monopoly tax. The real Microsoft customers are the entities that can strengthen their monopoly. Such as RIAA/MPAA. Key application developers that can be made MS-only. Device manufacturers that can be made into producing hardware that only runs Windows. Web sites that only work with IE. etc...