Microsoft Talking To The Recording Industry About Copy Protection

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the well-that's-useless dept

It looks like Cory Doctorow’s talk to Microsoft about why copy protection is bad for everyone — including the recording industry, customers, and Microsoft itself — didn’t have much of an impact. Microsoft is now in talks with the recording industry about how to build copy protection into their next generation operating system to make sure you can’t actually do what you want with the music you buy. Of course, this is likely to be an expensive waste of time that will only annoy legitimate buyers by causing problems. The people who really want to copy music will figure out workarounds. The large counterfeiters will already have big workarounds, so it won’t impact their business at all. The only people impacted will be people who want to do perfectly legitimate things with the music they bought, but find out they’re blocked because Microsoft and the recording industry doesn’t trust them.