When I talk about certification by h/w makers, I am referring to companies like AMD, Intel, Seagate, Samsung, Nvidia, ATI and so forth.

That said, I agree — Microsoft should have fought these new restrictions. As with Zune, MS seems to be going out of their way to bend over backwards for the content companies, which is ironic, because they’re the one company that has the best chance of getting the content companies to backpedal. At the same time, one of the biggest content companies is also one of their biggest competitors (Sony).

But given how dumb HD content protection is, why not just attack that? The article above makes some misleading and sometimes blatantly wrong assertions about the implications of the technology. (You’ll go blind! Your house will burn down! Your children will become impotent!) Now, granted, Microsoft’s own early documentation was so sweeping and poorly written, some of these implications could be inferred by the early specs. But at this point, it’s better to look at the reality of Vista as it’s shipping. I still think there’s plenty worth criticizing or debating — unless you think that $400 box with however many millions of lines of code is, line for line, perfect, that would be the case. But there’s the reality of the OS, and as long as you’re not playing HD-DVDs or Blu-Ray, none of this stuff may matter. (Then we can get back into the debate about which OS’ audio driver implementation, etc., is better.)

Open source operating systems are designed to run on hardware, not MS Windows. The certification and collaboration should be coming from h/w manufacturers, not a software company.

For myself, I like this little story from Gutman’s own article:

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Here’s an illustrative story about what can happen when the content- industry tail tries to wag the dog. About 10-15 years ago, music companies told a bunch of NZ TV stations that they had to pay fees in order to screen music videos. The TV stations disagreed, saying that they were providing free advertising for the music companies, and if they didn’t like that then they’d simply stop playing music videos. So they stopped playing all music videos.

After a few weeks, cracks stated to appear as the music companies realised just how badly they needed the TV channels. One of the music companies bought an entire prime-time advertising block (at phenomenal cost, this wasn’t a single 30-second slot but every slot in an entire prime-time ad break) just to play one single new music video.

Shortly afterwards, music videos reappeared on TV. The details of the settlement were never made public, but I imagine it consisted of a bunch of music company execs on their knees begging the TV stations to start playing music videos again and let’s please never bring this matter up again.

It’s the same with Microsoft, the content industry needs them as badly (or more badly) than Microsoft needs the content industry. Claiming that they’re only following orders from Hollywood is a red herring — if Microsoft declined to implement this stuff, Hollywood would have to give in because they can’t afford to lock themselves out of 95% of the market, in the same way that the music companies couldn’t afford to cut out their primary advertising channel.
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I’m intrigued about why you see MS’s content protection being staggered and escapable and Gutman does not, other than perhaps his comment that its his role to warn about the worse consequences of MS’ designs in this area.

I haven’t sorted through the whole thing yet, but it looks interesting.

http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2007/01/20/windows-vista-content-protection-twenty-questions-and-answers.aspx

But the story may simpler than all this concern about possibilities. My reading of the relevant technical documents suggests to me that one possibility that manufacturers of audio gear for musicians will consider is to ignore PMP signatures altogether, as the infrastructure may well have too damned many implicit complications to be tolerated by or worth developing for a target market which has little or no need to play back “premium” content through their studio gear. This would mean there is no signature to revoke and thus no way for Microsoft to decide your studio will suddenly stop working in the middle of a project because some dork on the other side of the world might copy Talladega Nights. Musicians may be generating content which will later be DRM’d up the wazoo, but during the creative process they have no need to accept the same restrictions as pirates… oops, I mean legitimate MPAA customers.

Where this might get hairy is when a musician’s brain needs premium content for reference. A typical starving artist with just one high-quality pro audio interface might need to resort to Vista-vetted motherboard audio. But as long as a brain, and not a recording, is the final target for that output, she should be OK.

Precisely. The rumors for Vista are ominous. I decided not to wait and find out. I don’t think Apple, in whatever approach they take, plan on crippling pro-audio stuff out of their fear and paranoia. What do you do if if the artists are the collateral damage on both O/Ses in this DRM war against user. Downgrade? Switch to linux? I doubt Apple will cripple their O/S. I know several people who are seriously considering Macs now… I’ll admit I have still very little experience on the Mac, but my perception so far is that it is computers and O/Ses done right (as opposed to MS where something never feels quite right to me). If the studios make it impossible to watch movies on your computer without breaking them, then maybe it’s a good thing? Maybe we’ll be inclined to go play with our synths and be more creative. All this multi-tasking, IM, and web enabledness makes for great distractions.

There are plenty of indications. The movie studios are demanding it.

But it will be interesting to see how Apple intends to deal with protected premium content (downloadable HD video, Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs) on the Mac, future iPods and the forthcoming iTV. Apple still has to keep all the studios happy (well all except one).

I heard from someone who works for the EFF that Apple does not intend to use Intel’s trusted computing architecture for DRM. Although they may use the Intel CPU’s encryption system for copy protection for the OS.

We should see some indications soon as more details of Leopard and the new media products like iTV are released, hopefully, next week.