Microsoft and DRM (Digital-Rights Management)

This topic has come to the limelight with pretty hot debates once Vista has been released. Lets just see what all this controversy is about.

Windows Vista includes content protection infrastructure specifically designed to help ensure that protected commercial audiovisual content, such as newly released HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs, can be enjoyed on Windows Vista PCs. In many cases this content has policies associated with its use that must be enforced by playback devices. The policies associated with such content are applicable to all types of devices including Windows Vista PCs, computers running non-Windows operating systems, and standalone consumer electronics devices such as DVD players. If the policies required protections that Windows Vista couldn't support, then the content would not be able to play at all on Windows Vista PCs. Clearly that isn't a good scenario for consumers who are looking to enjoy great next generation content experiences on their PCs.

What is all the fuss about this and how does this affect the common end users :
from http://www.coofercat.com/node/1081

Vista is all about 'premium content'. This is music or video that's copyrighted by one of the major music or movie companies. Basically, if any such content is being played, Vista goes into a sort of 'protected mode'. When this is happening, your computer becomes very careful not to 'leak' this protected content. That means that any devices on your machine that can play this content (eg. your video card, sound card etc) have to work in a special way. The idea is (for example) that your video card will send coded signals to your monitor, so that you couldn't plug in some sort of recorder and simply scoop up the signal and record it. The problem is, not all monitors/TVs can handle these coded signals. If yours doesn't then Vista will reduce the quality of the output so that it's not worth recording. Incidentally, you don't get a choice, it just happens.

Futher than that, if you're listening to a CD, then your monitor may go fuzzy at the same time! Just because one thing is handling protected content, the other may become crippled as well!

As if that's not enough, some devices can simply become disabled, either during premium content playback, or at some arbitrary time in the future as decided by Microsoft. Basically, if a device (or it's associated driver software) are found to be leaking content sometime in the future, then Microsoft can stop it working when you next update your computer. Given Microsoft's history in this area, it's pretty much required to update your computer say, once a month at the moment, so you're almost certainly going to *have* to get your leaky device disabled reasonably soon after MS decide to disable it. They'll disable things until some fix can be found, provided one can be found. Maybe the hardware/driver in question is so old the vendor doesn't want to fix the problem, or maybe it just can't be fixed.

This is horrible: You update your computer to protect yourself from viruses and such like, and instead your graphics card stops working! If it's one built onto the motherboard, perhaps on a laptop, then well, you're screwed - go and buy a whole new machine, as it's almost certainly not worth trying to fix it.

So to summarise these few points (yes, there are more I haven't even mentioned!):

1) All Vista compatible hardware will be more expensive than it otherwise would be. This is because hardware vendors have to comply with very strict rules, and have to add extra hardware features to their products to make them work with Vista. This all requires extra testing, which aside from costing more takes more time.

2) When playing premium content, your computer's performance may degrade. That is, the video or sound quality in particular may degrade, but also raw system performance may also degrade as your computer works to protect that premium content as it moves around inside your computer.

3) Whatever your computer is doing today, it may not do it tomorrow. If you're unlucky enough to have some hardware which later is found to be unfriendly to the content industry, it may just aribtrarily stop working. It's not because of a hardware failure per-se, and you may not even know how, or want to copy premium content, but Windows will refuse to use your device. If you're really lucky, an update may come along in the future, if not, you may well end up buying a new computer (oh, and your old one probably won't fetch much on Ebay either!).

I don't think Vista sounds like a good deal for end-users. Microsoft look set to do quite well out of it, provided we all lap it up like we're supposed to.

Update 14th Feb, 2007: A little looking around brings more to light about Vista's hardware requirements. Reghardware started me on this trail, but arstechnica have a slightly more inclusive article along the same lines.

To me, these articles say very loudly: Don't buy a Vista PC until AT LEAST June 1st, 2007, and preferably June 1st, 2008. Only then does the hardware you buy fully reach maturity, and so will be optimal for running Vista. Before that, you'll always have hardware that doesn't do everything Vista wants. Given what we know about Vista and it's use of hardware, I'd say anything less than optimal hardware is an incredible risk to take. Annecdotally, by June 2008 it's also likely that there'll be a Service Pack or two out, so the major problems with Vista will have been fixed.

So by Vista if you must, but wait until June 1st, 2008 to do it.

Explanation from the Vista blog :

Associating usage policies with commercial content is not new to Windows Vista, or to the industry. In fact, much of the functionality discussed in the paper has been part of previous versions of Windows, and hasn’t resulted in significant consumer problems – as evidenced by the widespread consumer use of digital media in Windows XP. For example:

* Standard definition DVD playback has required selective use of Macrovision ACP on analog television outputs since it was introduced in the 1990s. DVD playback on and in Windows has always supported this.
* The ability to restrict audio outputs (e.g., S/PDIF) for certain types of content has been available since Windows Millennium Edition (ME) and has been available in all subsequent versions of Windows.
* The Certified Output Protection Protocol (COPP) was released over 2 years ago for Windows XP, and provides applications with the ability to detect output types and enable certain protections on video outputs such as HDCP, CGMS-A, and Macrovision ACP.

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. Similarly, if someone was listening to commercial audio content while viewing medical imagery, none of the video protection mechanisms would be activated and the displayed images would again be unaffected.

Contrary to claims made in the paper, the content protection mechanisms do not make Windows Vista PCs less reliable than they would be otherwise -- if anything they will have the opposite effect, for example because they will lead to better driver quality control.

The paper implies that Microsoft decides which protections should be active at any given time. This is not the case. The content protection infrastructure in Windows Vista provides a range of à la carte options that allows applications playing back protected content to properly enable the protections required by the policies established for such content by the content owner or service provider. In this way, the PC functions the same as any other consumer electronics device.


Aren't there already output content protection features in Windows XP?

Yes. Output content protections are not new requirements for commercial content. The CSS content protection system for DVD-video discs requires output protections such as Macrovision ACP and limiting the resolution on component video outputs to standard definition. Windows XP has supported these requirements for some time.

They provide a set of 20 questions and answers as well.

An excerpt from the article "Microsoft Buffeted By Criticism Over Vista DRM"
By Alexander Wolfe , TechWeb Technology News

From Microsoft's perspective, its attempt to comply with a DRM scheme developed by the consumer electronics industry is getting unfairly blown up into a nefarious plan that's far from reality. "Articles saying that you will need new monitors with Windows Vista to play any DRMed content are not correct," said Ken Birge, a spokesman for Microsoft. "Any DRM content that's out there today, you'll be able to play with any existing monitor using Vista."

However, Birge confirms that new monitors will be required to support full playback of high-definition DVDs. "Next-generation DVDs will require HDCP for playback," Birge said. "So that requires HDCP protection all the way out to monitor. As PCs become more of a home entertainment device, consumers are going to expect to play back next-generation DVDs. In order to do that, Microsoft has to require this HDCP support all the way out to the monitor. It's very much following suit to what the consumer electronics industry has already done."

Indeed, Birge pointed out that many high-definition monitors made for the consumer electronics market already comply with HDCP, though most computer monitors have yet to do so. The next-generation DVDs will play on old-style monitors, he said, but in a degraded performance mode. "If you have a Windows Vista machine, and you have your legacy monitor, and you were to pop [in] one of these next-generation DVDs and try to play it back, it wouldn't not play," Birge said. "What it will do is down-sample to something around [standard] DVD quality; you won't get the high-definition experience."

At least one Microsoft watcher sees the company as caught between a rock and a hard place on the DRM issue. "Microsoft is trying to serve two masters, and that's not always an easy task," said Joe Wilcox, a senior analyst at Jupiter Research, "Master one is Hollywood and the content providers, who want their stuff protected. Master two is the consumer, who wants to be able to get at everything easily. And Microsoft's kind of caught in the middle. There are a lot of [DRM] mechanisms being proposed and implemented and Microsoft is just hedging its bets here. If [HDCP] really reaches a mass market, then Windows Vista will be able to support it."



so, whats the catch here, one should/not buy Vista until this problem is cleared by all hardware vendors that you depend on? Or else end up paying for Vista and low performance of your hardware?