...do you suppose this new stance has anything to do with the DRM monstrosities inside Vista? Both a technical nightmare and a threat to multiplatform media formats?
.................
Perhaps.
But I suspect, following Princeton's Ed Felten, that Jobs may see this more as a marketing opportunity than anything else. For example, note this recent Apple ad named "Security":
<http://movies.apple.com/movies/us/apple/getamac/apple-getamac-security_480x376.mov>
Ostensibly, the advert spoofs one of the more annoying elements of Vista's security infrastructure - specifically, repeated warning dialogs from the User Account Control feature (formerly, User Account Protection) - but can also, if you stretch it a bit, be viewed as an overall criticism of Vista's DRM, which is security of another sort, designed to act as gatekeeper for the benefit of "content providers".
Jean-Christophe Helary:
...the truth is that DRM does not work _right now_ only because the hardware does not support it. And the Vista move aims at making it run in the long run with _all_ the hardware to be produced from now on to run Vista compliant DRM crap (from the smallest CD player to the biggest plasma screens). So if some European groups are keen at pointing at Apple's scheme, they'd rather spend their energy on what is really going on: Vista= global content locking (made universal since Vista is planned to be everywhere).
................
Yes, precisely.
Microsoft admiring colleagues of mine who're running Vista have been emailing and phoning to happily report that they're still able to view movies and listen to music without hassle. 'See', they insist, 'that business about DRM has been completely overblown'.
Of course, what these people are missing is that all of the Advanced Access Content System (AACS) compliant pieces are not yet in place, the fortress is still under construction. Vista's DRM subsystem is the foundation for a digitally closed future.
.d.
I've told you a million times...never repeat yourself.
Papa Smurf ...................... http://monroelab.net/blog/