Jan 19th, 2007
Windows Vistas ‘Content Protection’
I came across this really interesting paper by Peter Gutmann of the University of Auckland. He does a cost analysis of the ‘content protection’ implemented in Microsofts new gift to humanity. He starts off with some technical features and quite an interesting point about hardware currently being sold as HD-ready. It simply isn’t. Some of the decoding hardware just simply wasn’t available until recently. So these big-ass LCD-screens might technically be able to display HD-content, you just won’t get Vista to give it any.
Moving on from this, he describes the likely (inevitable, if you ask me) consequences in terms of pricing and availability of hardware. Not surprisingly, the cost of this ‘content protection’ is passed on to the consumer. ATI even openly admits this.
I as a Linux user have a mixed opinion when it comes to Vista. On the one hand, it will be a huge boost for Linux. Considering the horrendous costs for licences and hardware upgrades and the comparatively low gain in features, more people will be looking for alternatives. And since you can get a 3D desktop running on half the graphics power in Linux [link], there is an incentive to switch. I won’t even start about viruses, spyware, security, etc..
On the other hand, Vista is another big drive to close up technologies, make users dependent and take away choice. The unholy alliance between the movie studios, recording industry and Microsoft is pushing hard to turn computers into ‘content delivery systems’, i.e. TVs with a keyboard.
That this is not simply an analogy, made up by me to scare you, is illustrated in this passage:
[…] Alongside the all-or-nothing approach of disabling output, Vista requires that any interface that provides high-quality output degrade the signal quality that passes through it if premium content is present. This is done through a “constrictor” that downgrades the signal to a much lower-quality one, then up- scales it again back to the original spec, but with a significant loss in quality. So if you’re using an expensive new LCD display fed from a high- quality DVI signal on your video card and there’s protected content present, the picture you’re going to see will be, as the spec puts it, “slightly fuzzy”, a bit like a 10-year-old CRT monitor that you picked up for $2 at a yard sale. In fact the specification specifically still allows for old VGA analog outputs, but even that’s only because disallowing them would upset too many existing owners of analog monitors. In the future even analog VGA output will probably have to be disabled. The only thing that seems to be explicitly allowed is the extremely low-quality TV-out, provided that Macrovision is applied to it. […]
In his final thoughts Gutmann attempts to identify the motive behind this focus on ‘content protection by Microsoft.
At the end of all this, the question remains: Why is Microsoft going to this much trouble? Ask most people what they picture when you use the term “premium-content media player” and they’ll respond with “A PVR” or “A DVD player” and not “A Windows PC”. So why go to this much effort to try and turn the PC into something that it’s not?
In July 2006, Cory Doctorow published an analysis of the anti-competitive nature of Apple’s iTunes copy-restriction system which looked at the benefits of restrictive DRM for the company that controls the DRM. The only reason I can imagine why Microsoft would put its programmers, device vendors, third-party developers, and ultimately its customers, through this much pain is because once this copy protection is entrenched, Microsoft will completely own the distribution channel. In the same way that Apple has managed to acquire a monopolistic lock-in on their music distribution channel […], so Microsoft will totally control the premium-content distribution channel. Not only will they be able to lock out any competitors, but because they will then represent the only available distribution channel they’ll be able to dictate terms back to the content providers whose needs they are nominally serving in the same way that Apple has already dictated terms back to the music industry: Play by Apple’s rules, or we won’t carry your content. The result will be a technologically enforced monopoly that makes their current de-facto Windows monopoly seem like a velvet glove in comparison.
Quite a bleak outlook. I hope the market share of alternative operating systems grows in a way that forces hardware manufacturers to play attention to them.