a convenient truth

The long gestation of Microsoft Windows Vista has in some way taken attention away from what is probably the most important feature of the software — the integration of [DRM](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Rights_Management) deep into every component of the Operating System.

Techworld have [an article](http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?newsid=7675) describing some of the effects. None of this is news really, these features are in many ways the raison d’être of the Vista project.

Basically, Microsoft have taken DRM to it’s logical conclusion. Right now, DRM is only able to restrict content in very specialised circumstances. Let’s take iTunes as an example (since the Zune doesn’t work with Vista). Apple get a copy of, lets say, … Baby One More Time by Britney Spears. Clearly access to this work needs to be restricted as much as possible, for the good of humanity.

Apple take this masterpiece and encrypt it. The file they transmit to end users is unplayable as-is, because of the encryption, preserving the unwitting purchaser from hearing the dulcit tones of Miss Spears. This is why they call it “protection”. Now, if the purchaser wishes to listen to this record, they must play it using the iTunes player. This sees the encryption, and asks Apple for the key to play the record. Apple’s servers check that the user has indeed purchased the record and, if they have, provide the key. The iTunes player then decrypts the record and plays it.

And right now this is as far as technology can go with protecting the user from Miss Spears. During playback the computer has access to the unencrypted content, and with properly crafted drivers the content could be duplicated in it’s unprotected state. Similarly many computers have an S/PDIF socket which lets you send digital music from your computer to a digital amplifier, allowing much higher quality music reproduction — and also record it.

Apple can’t stop you doing this — their software can just hand off the music, bit by bit, for the OS to play. This is the “Digital Hole”.

But no longer! Now, with Vista the encryption can extend all the way to the speakers (well, nearly). iTunes can inform Vista that the content is dangerous, and that releasing it on an unsuspecting consumer could damage them (as in the case of the lovely Miss Spears). In this case, Vista will refuse to allow the unencrypted content to be played on unsafe devices. This means the content must be re-encrypted before being sent to a sound card. The sound card then unencrypts the music before playing it. If your sound card doesn’t do this, then you can’t use it.

Your S/PDIF interface will be disabled when playing restricted content. Every way you can imagine for getting at the actual raw music has been removed or massively reduced in quality when you are playing this sort of content.

This is a really seriously challenging exercise in computing. If you can imagine the number of lines of code, and the complex cooperation between vendor components that’s needed to orchestrate this sort of behaviour, this is going to introduce a slew of bugs, complexities and incompatibilities. It also uses quite a lot of system resources, in all the extra crypto work and in monitoring devices to make sure they aren’t doing what they oughtn’t.

The cost of implementing all of this, by Microsoft originally, by all the vendors who need to cooperate to make it work and to the user in the extra oomph they need to purchase and the time spent rebooting broken computers is immense. Over the lifetime of Vista, with the billions of possible users, this could easily add a few trillion dollars of extra expense. Well worth every penny to protect the innocent public from unadulterated exposure to the lovely Miss Spears I am sure you will agree.

But say, for example, the user chose to listen to something less incendiary. Who precisely benefits from this quite significant economic cost? A cost born entirely by the purchaser of this shiny new Operating System. One person we can conclude confidently that it does not benefit is the very person who buys Vista — all the software does is let them play some music they could play before.

Does it benefit Microsoft? You’d assume so, for the huge amounts they’ve spent on it. I can imagine a world where all media owners required this sort of technology and only Vista offers these features. In this hypothetical world, Vista would have a massive advantage. Who is going to buy an iBook when they can’t even listen to “… One More Time”?

In the music industry it’s becoming pretty clear that the world is not like this. If Vista had existed ten years ago, then this would be plausible. The industry has faced it’s demons now though, and is slowly coming to accept a world where their product can be easily duplicated. They are finding other business models. They make a lot of money out of iTunes as it is, and are not going to cut off Apple when Vista is released.

Other industries, such as the (probably most massive of everything, ever) burgeoning Internet television business are going to have to come to their own conclusions about DRM — but I’d be willing to bet quite a bit that in the final analysis they’ll settle for the vast oodles of cash they’ll make without DRM as it is. Making it more difficult for your customer to buy or use your product is bad for business. c.f. [YouTube](http://youtube.com).

So if Microsoft won’t sell more copies of Vista, then why have they gone to all this effort? I bet if you ask Bill Gates, even he won’t know. Certainly he seems to have [gone off DRM](http://www.boingboing.net/2006/12/14/bill_gates_dont_buy_.html) (his legal advice is very suspect incidentally).

Personally I reckon this is a case of an organisation gone mad — something that isn’t uncommon in large organisations with a lot of management. Some senior bod has decreed that DRM is “good”, and the organisation has swung ponderously into motion. Vast teams of architects and engineers spend years crafting a solution, none of them willing, able or interested in asking whether their efforts are worthwhile. By the time the effort has been expended and the product completed, who is going to ask it if it was worthwhile? Is there anyone with the cojones to pull the features?

Mr Gates was always the one with the cojones — and he certainly had them. He understood at a fundamental level that you can’t allow this sort of thing to drift — business strategies take on a life of their own, and that vitality is enough to defeat lesser men. I think those in charge at Microsoft now are all lesser men, and that these features, and others driven by the same attitude, will eventually be their downfall.

Update 15/1/2007: some [real detail](http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt) from Peter Gutmann, who has done some research on this.