Given that I have to re-activate Windows every time I change my hardware, I'm not a fan of DRM.
However, commercial companies are responsible for proliferating standards by supporting them. A non-DRM standard is not going to become popular by default, because content providers will not support it.
To fix the problem, you have to understand the problem. DRM is here to stay, like it or not. I wish open-source developers were working as hard as the companies to develop a "good" DRM standard. Blindly bashing DRM because it is "bad" is not going to help. People need to bash formats for the right reasons.
Oh yeah, and Vista is not alone when it comes to DRM. So, if you're going to bash something, make sure you bash the right people, too.
From the anti-DRM article:
"Disabling of Functionality"The biggest problem, and valid. I don't want content to stop working in the future, and I definately don't want it to stop working should I move it to another device that
I own.
Supposedly, we license the
right to use software. However, DRM seems to stick to the physical media model, or at least the keys model. By default, the actual usage conflicts with the license specification.
"Decreased Playback Quality"Depends on the scaling technique. This varies from manufacturer to manufacturer, and it not caused directly by DRM. The real question is how well Vista handles scaling, not whether it does it at all. Almost
everything does scaling, really. Even [good] SDTV DVD players do some form of filtering because raw DVD signals look like crap.
"Elimination of Open-source Hardware Support"This is all about licensing and documentation availability. Documentation for drivers is the manufacturer's responsibility. If they feel the open source market is too small or an IP risk, that's their call. No different than it is today. Having some trouble getting documentation from ATI to make a Linux driver? Well, that's obviously because of Microsoft's driver model.
"Elimination of Unified Drivers"I don't know much about unified drivers, but I do recall that when SATA was not built into chipsets, manufacturers had to make all their own drivers for each OS, and hell was the result. Today, everything is integrated, so we have a unified driver, and all OSes do it the same way. Only the early adopters got screwed.
"Denial-of-Service via Driver/Device Revocation"Isn't this part of Decreased Playback Quality? I find the TNT2 chipset example they provided as weak, partly because nVidia is responsible for keeping drivers up to date, and that chipset probably won't have a Vista driver at all. That's not Microsoft's fault. Also, I doubt Vista would try channeling premium content through an old graphics card in the first place (content is not actually written directly to the frame buffer in most cases), so decreased playback quality, not denial-of-service, would be the result.
"Decreased System Reliability"BUNK. If manufacturers don't follow specifications, that's not the fault of the spec, no matter how complex it may be.
Reliabilty follows commitment. If driver developers are trying to cram in too many features and are sacrificing quality control to get their products to market as quickly as possible, no standard is going to help. I recall ATI has had a wide variety of quality control issues with their drivers in the past. They are going to take the easy way out and blame Vista? Maybe they should dump "Catalyst Control Center" first. Who on earth needs
customizable skins for a friggin' driver?
"Increased Hardware Costs"The same thing was said when USB was introduced. I remember when USB printers and scanners had a $30 price premium over those that used the parallel port. Anyone want to go back to RS232? Didn't think so.
Quote from ATI:
"This increases motherboard design costs, increases lead times, and reduces OEM configuration flexibility. This cost is passed on to purchasers of multimedia PCs and may delay availability of high-performance platforms."In other words, new hardware costs more than old hardware. I supposed prices won't come down and budget hardware will cease to exist and all manufacturers everywhere will go bankrupt?
This sounds more like Nintendo whining that they can't afford to use anti-aliasing, HD graphics, and DVD playback, because otherwise they wouldn't be able to make a $60-$80 profit on every Wii they sell, while the rest of the competition makes money on 3rd-party royalties, instead.
The real question is whether any one company has an unfair competitive advantage. If everyone has to do the same thing, it all balances out. Somehow, I don't think ATI and nVidia will go to the poorhouse because they have to support DRM. Don't these companies thrive on HD technology? Don't they have all kinds of options for turning computers into movie players and media centers? They complain about it because they would rather reap the benefits but not spend money making the hardware, which is odd since they specialize in video hardware. So long as everyone else in the same boat, there really shouldn't be any unfair competition -- except by older standards which have fewer features.
"Increased Cost due to Requirement to License Unnecessary Third-party IP"The key word is "unnecessary." This is a valid concern, but you can thank the broken patent system for this. Even JPEG2000 can't gain widespread acceptance because people are worried that somebody might suddenly and mysteriously claim they own a patent on it at some point. You have to pay for technology. If you don't like it, ask the open-source guys to make a decent DRM standard. Companies are going to use DRM no matter what. The public must influence corporations to use the right one. It just so happens that the choices are bleak.
"Unnecessary CPU Resource Consumption"ATI is complaining about this, while at the same time their GPUs have hardware-based decoders for DVD playback, vertex shaders, texture compression, and physics -- tasks that were all once handled by the CPU.
Doesn't ATI now belong to AMD, a CPU company, and together they are working to consolodate CPU and GPU design for greater efficiency? Perhaps people should be complaining more about the lack of tools to utilize these interesting new hybrid architectures, rather than complain that the CPU has to do everything, which these days, it certainly doesn't.
Not that Amigans would know anything about custom hardware replacing the CPU, of course.
"Unnecessary Device Resource Consumption"Refer to FLV files, or playing MPG movies in an Adobe Flash wrapper. That's unnecessary resource consumption, but do companies complain about that? Everybody has their own Flash MPG movie player these days. In fact, there's too many damn incompatible formats because companies love them so much!
koaftder: "Not any different from back in the day. We have always had DRM, even back in the 80's. Those discs that had purposly bad sectors that couldn't be copied, serials and dongles, etc. Nothing new. The only thing that is new is that the average guy deals with this crap now instead of us 'geeks'."
Indeed. Oh, and don't forget typing in codes from manuals. I remember games with copy protection so aggressive, half the time the games didn't boot at all. The result? After buying a legal copy, I got the cracked version so the damn thing actually
worked!Talk about disabling of functionality!
