Hollywood has their Hands in Vista

Filed under: Audio, Business, Internet, OS Updates, Video, News, Windows, Microsoft

Hollywood has their Hands in Vista

by David Chartier Aug 15th 2005

Back in July Marc posted about the inclusion of display-based DRM in Vista, or "Longhorn" as it was called way back then. Just over the weekend, however, I found even more information on DRM technologies that Hollywood themselves are dictating be built not only into Vista but the next generation hardware that it's going to run on. Check out the Microsoft document (2 MB doc) detailing new functionality such as the "High Bandwidth Cipher", a hardware-based encryption method that will encrypt, decrypt, and re-encrypt video as it passes back and forth over a PC's bus as many as 10 processor-crippling times.. all in Hollywood's quest to ensure the safety of its content.

I have to be honest boys and girls: news like this is starting to make me feel a little queasy. Am I the only one who's paranoid over an impending storm of DRM policing? Feel free to sound off.

[via Daring Fireball]

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

AFD said 10:16PM on 8-15-2005

Microsoft & Intel's initiatives for hardware-based DRM only prove to me that both companies are far more interested in catering to content providers at the expense of a consumer's right to fair-use. I'll stick with my old OS and processor until their plans either fail or can be disabled, or my current hardware dies. Why would I want to upgrade to a platform that gives me less control over my PC and purchased media?

tevetorbes said 10:31PM on 8-15-2005

Anybody hear about how the RIAA is now saying that pirating music via p2p has been reduced to the number 2 spot by pirating music from your friend's CD collection?

http://www.corante.com/copyfight/archives/2005/08/15/p2p_now_number_2.php (and others like /.)

/rant

I mean really- the only way to win this fight is to not buy crappy music and pay money to see crappy films: don't buy Britney Spears because you like one song or go see Stealth because it has Jessica Biel's frontmeat prominently displayed.

Buying the crap that these thugs are selling perpetuates the cashflow that funds all this garbage: I swear some people could get a letter from the **AA in the mail detailing how their mother sucks cocks in hell and they'd STILL listen to crappy music and pay 10 bones to see crappy movies.

Wake up, or we won't have any choices soon.

/rant off

hkid said 10:35AM on 8-16-2005

Well people just have bad taste and laways will.
White girls in Nebraska will continue to buy Britney's album or whoever else Jive records replaces her with.
And frat boys will go see Stealth, Wedding Crashers and all its brethen over and over. New technology is sadly only getting more restrictive instead of easier to use.
Soon CDs you buy from the store wont be able to be burned to your PC.
Honestly Vista is shaping up to be crap. My initial excitement is gone. Tiger has already beat them in features available today and Apple's next OS will be even further past Vista. I seriously cannot imagine what Apple will put in their next OS. (Complete voice interaction with the computer? Open iTunes!)

Current windows users should just rock the XP Pro SP 3 (when it comes out) so they can have a modern OS without the draconian DRM.

Most of the Longhorn features will be made available for XP and you have Google desktop or Copernic for Spotlight searches, Konfabulator is free for the Sidebar/Dashboard stuff. You can get transparency now. Can anyone say what features will be Vista only?
New icons???
Virtual folders???
New minimize buttons??

The only exclusive features are the DRM shackles.

Vista might be the best thing to happen to XP.

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