Someone who read this pointed me to a Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection, while someone else pointed me to this response. If you don’t mind video’s, there’s some interesting background discussion over on channel9.
One simplification of the complexity is as follows:
- Intellectual property can be easily copied if the original is encoded in some digital format
- There’s a big market for digitally encoded content, and as a consequence of that demand the owners of intellectual property have decided to provide a supply
- These suppliers want / need to enforce the protection of the intellectual property represented by this digitally encoded content
- Technology provides mechanisms to provide that enforcement mechanism – some more successfully than others
- Holes can be used to circumvent the enforcement, and as technology improves to close the holes some legitimate scenarios for using the product can be blocked
- Some implementations of enforcement also block consumers rights, for example in some jurisdictions the right to ‘fair use’
- Some people dispute what rights people have or how the legal definition of a right translates to actual actions
…and your opinion on all this, and what matters, depends in large part on where you view that set of complex interactions from.
There’s much more detail on the background to this in the book Pirates of the Digital Millennium [amazon], which, thanks to the library, I’ve just finished and, to wrap things up nicely, Mr. Jobs has just published an essay on the topic slated towards music and Apples’ rights management system.
Looks like someone else has had enough with user account creation and signing up for services.
If you’ve heard me going on and on about backup then you might be interested in this…
…based on some research from 2005-ish, households in the USA with broadband and 2 or more PCs sharing an Internet connection have the following characteristics:
- On average, these households have 3 “active” PCs with the majority running a mix of Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional
- Over 90% of these households own a digital camera
- Over 95% own a color printer
- 70% own a game console
- Less than 20% feel they have a good backup solution
Yikes. I’d wager that a fair few of the 20% that do feel they have a good backup solution just haven’t had a catastrophic failure. One of the biggest pain points with backup is making it happen, especially across multiple PCs. Enter Windows Home Server (the home server blog is where those stats are from) announced at CES earlier this year which provides backup; media sharing and remote content access with an appliance like philosophy. Yes, us geeks can install on random hardware, but there’s were some exciting complete solutions previewed at CES. To quote Paul Thurrott:
I’m excited about Windows Home Server in a way that I haven’t been about technology since the first time I laid eyes on Windows Media Center (“Freestyle”), back in early 2002. Enthusiasts are going to eat this thing up, and once more typical consumers catch on, I suspect Windows Home Server is going to find a huge market indeed. And that’s a good thing: Windows Home Server looks like a winner, and I can’t wait to get this thing up and running in my home.
Oh, and it appears you can use this as a target for Mac backup too.
Now available on microsoft.com is an add-in for Windows that provides extended support for metadata in image files. The add-in supports Windows XP SP2 through to Vista and provides extra info like this…
and this…
as seen using my little metadata test file and, errrrrr, Windows XP. Yes, this is on a box I haven’t upgraded yet, and yes, it was painful going back from Vista.
Tags: metadata tags exif iptc photography photo
