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January 15, 2007
Please, Tell Me You're Joking
A handful of years ago, a friend of mine who was working at Microsoft on DirectSound and I had a conversation about the futility of DRM and content protection.
My basic argument - which he didn't disagree with - was that at some point you have to convert the digital signal back into analog so a human can consume it - and at that point, your scheme falls apart (the so-called Analog Hole).
He asserted that Microsoft's desire was to push this hole as close to the rendering device (speakers, monitor) as physically possible, and thereby make it as difficult as possible to exploit the hole.
I was incredulous - I mean, how do you obsolete speakers? And why? What value does it add to the consumer? I shook my head - not disbelieving that Microsoft would think that way, but disbelieving that they'd ever go anywhere with this scatter-brained notion.
I was wrong.
Peter Gutmann has written a great little piece on the cost of the content protection in Vista - and reading it makes me wanna cry. Unlike previous ass-backwards moves by the 800lb Gorilla of the software world, which I was content to ignore living in my little open source paradise, this one fundamentally changes the economics of hardware development. The collateral damage, in the form of increased end-user costs and complexity - and the necessarily correlated reduction in reliability - affect the entire PC market.
Posted by dberger at January 15, 2007 2:03 PM