Around the time VISTA was released Peter Gutmann a respected Security researcher published a paper he called “A cost analysis of Vista content protection”. Now I don’t know Peter per-se, but I have had mail exchanges with him in the IETF as well as followed and used some of the work he has done over the last decade and he is no fool (actually he is very bright, and IMHO very funny!) but his latest push around VISTA and DRM confuses me.
I should start by saying that I am not a fan of DRM, at least by any definition of the word “fan” that I am familiar with, but I do take a realistic view to the problem that being it’s a necessary evil if we want to help bridge the gap between the “stone and mortar” business model the media companies believe they understand and the new on-line model they are being slowly moving to.
Now I don’t want to digress into the merits or problems with DRM but I do want to talk about Peter’s current tirade on VISTA and its support of DRM; the key point I want to discuss is the idea that DRM is being forced on personal content; that is simply not the case it. Only content where the creator (plausibly the owner) of the content decides they want to put constraints on the content gets constraints, otherwise the content goes clear.
It’s really that simple, George Ou of ZDNET has a more complete response to the other claims of Peter's paper that can be found here.
The key message I hope you walk away from on the topic of DRM in VISTA is that it enables you to experience content you could not experience otherwise, and short of making the cost of producing hardware/software capable of experiencing that content marginally more expensive to produce in the near term it’s a win for consumers as you would not have access to the content today without it.