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NARR: Microsoft considers the new Vista operating system an improvement over XP - but not everyone agrees. Eben Moglen is the director of the Software Freedom Law Center and says the new software contains features it would be better off without.
MOGLEN: These are things that we would call anti-features - stuff that people would pay not to get - Vista is full of them.
NARR: The features he's referring are part of something called Digital Rights Managements Software - or DRM. It's designed to prevent media - primarily audio and video from being copied. It's what prevents music from iTunes from being played on anything other than an iPod. what allows Napster to ensure your music expires with your subscription and its what keeps European DVD's from working in players in the US. Unlike previous versions of windows, Vista incorporates DRM right into the operating system, something Moglen predicts with create huge headaches for consumers.
MOGLEN: Vista DRM controls how your music works and whether your music works and can stop your music from working if it thinks that what you're doing isn't legitimate. Vista DRM controls whether your video displays work, And if there is any reason to suppose that the video display doesn't behave the way the movie company would like it to, even if it behaves the way you would like it to, it stops working.
NARR: That's because of something built into the software program called a tilt-pin.
MOGLEN: If anything goes wrong with the hardware, if anything is thought to go wrong with the hardware, if the hardware is modified in any way by a human being trying to change how it works the tilt-pin goes off and then it stops working. What Vista has in it is a lot of stuff to keep people from doing things they might want to do because a record company or a movie company might not want them to do it.
NARR: Things like copy premium content music and video that the record label or movie studio doesn't want copied. But the problem is that Vista's strict hardware requirements prevent users from doing things they should be able to do says Derek Slater of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
SLATER: All DRM blocks totally legitimate uses. There is no DRM system that can perfectly mimic the way the law gives consumers rights. It's simply impossible. But it's also supposed to prevent some illicit uses and particularly internet piracy.
NARR: The irony is that DRM doesn't do that very well -if at all.
SLATER: The fact of the matter is though, both in terms of theory and empirical evidence is that DRM does nothing to slow or stop piracy.
PEARLMAN: DRM is a fool's errand, so I say get rid of it - it's embarrassing to have to talk about it.
NARR: Sandy Pearlman is a record producer and a professor of music at McGill University in Montreal. He says one reason DRM doesn't work is that only a small fraction of the total songs downloaded contain DRM. And CD's don't contain DRM at all.
PEARLMAN: The percentage of the total traffic that is protected by DRM is inconsequential.
NARR: And hackers take care of what little there is.
PEARLMAN: You show a hacker something that's DRM'd and the hacker goes into a bezerker rage and has to undermine it - it's what they live to do
NARR: Take Alex Ionescu for example. He's a software engineering student in Montreal Canada who demonstrated how windows vista could be hacked. And he did it all before the operating system had even hit the shelves. The timing, he says was coincidence, but says media companies are trying to pull the wool over consumer's eyes.
IONESCU: The way the media companies are spinning it is they're telling you that it's all part of the premium experience because you know that your computer is completely optimized to get the best possible quality and they're not really telling you all the thing's they're doing behind your back, trying to make sure you're not pirating the movie.
NARR: The music and movie industries pressured software firms like Microsoft and Apple to incorporate DRM into their products. But Apple has begun to revolt. In February Apple CEO Steve Jobs publicly asked major music labels to stop requiring iTunes to protect songs with DRM technology, arguing that DRM-free music would boost music sales. None of the major music labels has yet to meet the challenge - Pearlman says the reason is that the companies refuse to let go of a dying business model.
PEARLMAN: For some reason they delude themselves into thinking that the day of reckoning going to come or come more slowly or isn't going to come if they could just universalize DRM music - well it's not gonna happen.
NARR: Pearlman estimates that if revenues continue to decline at the current rate, music companies as they exist today may disappear altogether within the next couple of years, and with them the folly of DRM. But for now, it's something consumers will have to learn to live with. Gretchen Cuda, Columbia Radio News.