Redmond gets on its knees for Hollywood
Posted on Tuesday, August 30, 2005 @ 21:41 CET
The company is establishing digital security checks that could even shut off a computer's connections to some monitors or televisions if antipiracy procedures that stop high-quality video copying aren't in place.
In short, the company is bending over backward--and investing considerable technological resources--to make sure Hollywood studios are happy with the next version of Windows, which is expected to ship on new PCs by late 2006. Microsoft believes it has to make nice with the entertainment industry if the PC is going to form the center of new digital home networks, which could allow such new features as streaming high-definition movies around the home.
No, no, no, no, no. This is so incredibly stupid that 4-letter words immediately spring to mind to further describe the idiocy that a certain Seattle-based company is exhibiting. Hopefully the fine folks in Cupertino won't succumb to the same pressure and shoot themselves in the foot.
Rip. Mix. Burn - anyone?
Everywhere around us we see wonderful examples and works of art that come from living in the finely-coined "Remix Culture", yet Hollywood (and the RIAA too, I'm sure) feels that it can impose itself on the software industry and order them to develop ways in which to dull the hammer of the 21st century digerati.
At the end of the day any sort of DRM or roadblocks that are set up will be circumvented or disabled (DVDs, Apple FairPlay, Napster and WiMP10 come to mind) - you simple cannot compete against the will of users, and some hacker somewhere (in the tinkering sense of the word) will defeat your silly protection scheme and in turn make you look like an idiot. Both to your customers (who will hate you for trying to paralyze the computer that at the end of the day they paid for) and of course to the Hollywood fat cats (who's bottom line you're "hurting"). Please.
Its not like it hasn't happened before.
If you bought or ordered a CD from Europe and took it back to the States, placed it in your CD-player and you were shown an error: "Unable to play - incorrect region code" you wouldn't be too happy. Yet this is exactly what happens today with DVDs. Thanks to Hollywood and the MPAA.
"The table is already set," said Marcus Matthias, product manager for Microsoft's digital media division. "We can come in and eat at the buffet, or we can stand outside and wash cars."Or you can run an alternative OS - such as Linux or OSX. In any case, most of the "innovation" that comes out of Redmond these days is technology that has been tried and tested on other platforms long before they ever made an appearance in the Start menu (Spotlight functionality, smart folders, Expose (their clone)).
These changes are worrisome to some computer programmers and digital activist groups. They fear that increasingly high security levels will block off avenues of programming innovation, or even stop computer owners from accessing portions of their own machines--a little like walling off a room inside a private house.Ay, que Vista mas aburrida.
Via CNet: Hollywood, Microsoft align on new Windows
Note: that image was made in Paint of all things due to my hdd crash of late, which explains why it looks crap.
Update: While reading Make Magazine volume 2 on the way home from work on the subway I ran across this great editorial by Mark Frauenfelder (editor-in-chief of Make) which speaks volumes of truth:
Innovation isn't only about making your own products from scratch; it's also about customizing the technology you already own to suit your needs...
Sadly, consumer electronics manufacturers have kowtowed to the overreaching demands of entertainment companies to lock up their products and prevent people from infringing on their copyrights. It's fine for a company to protect its intellectual property, but there are already plenty of laws to protect them and punish the guilty. In addition to the draconian penalties it's seduced Congress into legislating, Hollywood is also threatening hardware manufacturers into crippling the functionality of game, video and music players. Why can't you back up a DVD to your hard drive or copy it to your handheld computer? It's because Hollywood won't allow it.
...
Hollywood's efforts to impose Soviet-style centralized control on technology are a huge step backwards for innovation. As security consultant Bruce Schneier so aptly put it, the entertainment companies are "willing to destroy your privacy, have general-purpose computers declared illegal, and exercise special vigilante police powers that no one else has, just to make sure that no one watches The Little Mermaid without paying for it."
Now I'm not much of a hardware tinkerer, I mean I've built and fixed dozens of computers and opened the guts of many an Xbox - but I can't work a solder to save my life. However, Make Magazine just feeds the creative geek inside me (all of us?) and is a great source of inspiration. Highly recommended reading.
- paulo
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Comments:
Um, aren't hammers, by their nature, dull already?
Semantic quibbling aside, you're right about this. At this rate, I don't expect the big content pushers to "get it" and come up with a workable 21st-century solution for another five years or so. Ten or more, even, if the vast majority of their horrible lawsuits go their way.
# August 31, 2005 21:59 CET
Haha, good point! That analogy didn't quite work, did it. But yeah, what we need is a big player to stand up and face down the barrels of the lawyers as Sony did in the Betamax case - and since passing out isn't fun, I'm not holding my breath.
# August 31, 2005 22:17 CET
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