Microsoft’s Upcoming Vista Leans Towards Hollywood DRM Demands

Movie studios will have veto power over some features in Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Vista OS, according to Ed Felton’s reading of a new white paper detailing the “output content protection.” The “remarkable” 45-page document shows how Hollywood’s demand for content control is driving parts of Vista, initially known as Longhorn. For instance, a “high bandwidth cipher” will be allowed but will cause video stuttering on most PCs and most current monitors won’t be able to handle the Hollywood-required versions of certain features. The document “describes one compromise after another, in which performance, cost, and flexibility are sacrificed in a futile effort to prevent video content from leaking to the darknet. And the cost is high.”

Comments have been disabled for this post