Why Microsoft caved in on copy protection

AnchorDesk

Why Microsoft caved in on copy protection

David Coursey
Executive Editor, AnchorDesk
Wednesday, October 9, 2002

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What does Microsoft have in common with Britney Spears? Not much, except both can sing a song called, "Oops!... I did it again."

In Microsoft's case, that means the company screwed up--again--on a consumer-rights issue. And now it's retreated--again.

YOU WOULD HAVE THOUGHT that the Redmondians would have learned their lesson after Hailstorm (aka My Services) crashed and burned. As you may recall, that initiative was supposed to facilitate e-commerce and Web applications. But we haven't heard much about Hailstorm ever since people found out it would require them to hand over all their personal information (such as passwords and credit card numbers) to Microsoft for (supposedly) safe storage.

But Microsoft did not, apparently, learn from that little fiasco. When the company decided to add a personal video recorder to its new Media Center PC design, it designed the PVR so that content could only be viewed on the PC that recorded it. Which meant, for example, that you couldn't record a TV show, copy it onto a DVD, and view the disk on a consumer DVD player or another PC.

When this little design feature was announced (along with the first Media Center hardware), some people pretty much came unglued. The controversy over the digital-rights management issue drowned out the actual announcement of the new hardware (from HP, gorgeous but expensive, due in a few weeks) and ruined a few days in Redmond.

So now Microsoft is shifting its course.

The Media Center software has been changed so that now the copyright owner, not Microsoft, gets to decide whether a particular TV program will be "encrypted to the hard drive"--meaning, "unable to be viewed on a different PC or DVD player."

THIS IS DONE by making the Media Center software cognizant of a television standard called Copy Generation Management System for Analog (CGMS-A). If a couple of bits in a program's CGMS-A settings are switched on, Media Center PCs will encrypt the program, making it unplayable on anything but the recording PC. Leave them unflipped, and the program remains copyable. Microsoft says its testing found no television programming with the encryption bits turned on.

But that could change. It could be that copyright owners will get wise to the technology, flip the CGMS-A bits, and make it impossible to copy programs from a Media Center PC. But the good news, from Microsoft's point of view, is that you'll then have to complain to the entertainment company; it won't be Microsoft's fault. Whether this is a long-term win for consumers remains to be seen. What will the content owners do? But, in the short term, it's better than Microsoft's original plan.

MS promises to have the fix on the new HP hardware when it ships. The new Windows Media 9 Series Player will have it by the end of the year. Microsoft says it's working with other software player developers to help them implement the new copy-friendly technology as well.

It will also be year end before the content will be playable on consumer DVD players as well as on PCs. No word on what it will take to make the discs playable on Mac or other non-Microsoft OS machines.

LIKE MOST STORIES involving Microsoft (but not Britney), this one has a moral. A couple, actually. One is that if Microsoft had better communicated its plans to the press and analyst community before the announcement, this whole public relations fiasco could have been avoided entirely.

But the other moral--and this may offend those who believe Microsoft is the very personification of evil--is that Microsoft may actually care what customers think, and that it reacts to their criticism, in fairly public ways, when required.

No, this does not get Microsoft off the hook on all rights-management issues. But at least changing the Media Center's copy-protection scheme insures consumers some degree of "fair use" of the programs they record. Microsoft still has a ways to go. The company should tell us what it believes fair use means and how it intends to make sure customers aren't denied it by means of Microsoft technology.

Unfortunately, fair use is a bit like obscenity--easy to recognize, but hard to define. As I've said before, I think fair use means you should be able to make copies of copyrighted material for your own use and for sharing with friends. I don't think it extends to sharing that material with thousands of strangers over the Internet.

But for now, Microsoft's Media Center compromise takes the company out from the middle of that controversy. Instead of protecting TV programming whether it needs protection or not, MS's decision lets copyright owners make that decision. Which is how it should have been in the first place. If someone is going to control copying, it should be the copyright owner or the consumer and not a technology company.

While the process has been a major distraction for Microsoft's Media Center team (who have great things planned for the future), I'm glad it's over with and a compromise has been reached. And it's probably good that Microsoft learned this particular lesson early. Perhaps it means it won't make rights-management mistakes later, when they could be much more difficult to fix.

What do you think? Was Microsoft right to give copyright owners the ability to block copying? TalkBack to me!

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