Cost of Vista Content Protection Scheme

This is an excellent analysis of the impact that Windows Vista content protection will have on the entire PC market. It is hard to see Vista being a huge success for Microsoft. It is emerging with all the features and conditions of an OS designed 6 years ago. Just as the market is beginning to understand the harm of content protection schemes and locked content, Microsoft have released an OS that enshrines these principles at its heart.

Executive Summary ----------------- Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called "premium content", typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it's not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server). This document analyses the cost involved in Vista's content protection, and the collateral damage that this incurs throughout the computer industry. Executive Executive Summary --------------------------- The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.

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