If you think that all this hard work by artists, composers, writers, producers, screenwriters, etc... will be freely given to you for free then you are as crazy as the day is long. A thief is a thief. If you steal copyrighted material then you are a thief. If they cannot come up with a scheme to use software to protect thier property then they will use the law. And people will go to jail. The people who share the copyrighted material with anyone else will go to jail. It is unlikely they will bust people who just receive the stolen goods. But they can, and will, go after the big infringers. Not everyone will go to jail, but you might!

I STILL dont understand why SO many companies waste time, and money
with copyright crap. I dont agree with piracy myself, but as a
media developer, I know a few things. The foremost is that if someone
wants something - they WILL get it. The problem is that no matter how
smart your coders are, or how good your technology is, theres always
some 15 year old kid out there who can beat it.
There isnt a site that cant be hacked, or program cracked, and its
just futile to weaste so much time and effort on it. If they would
spend half as much time on the app, making the quality better, faster,
more efficient, then perhaps it would be worth paying for! But
you people know this already, yer smart cookies.

Another thing is that I think they have to realize a major section
of the net who are interested in streaming media..well.. doesnt
have a credit card. I am assuming this copyrighted streaming stuff
will be on account basis and probably cost $$$.

Even still...who listens to Realaudio networks anymore? Its just
freaking spam, commercials, and crappy bitrates.

And not a single good industrial stream anywhere. Gimmie a good
mp3 shoutcast and i'm dancin' :)

Not that the article was really about any of that, but still.

I think Microsoft's next move should be to create a restroom protocol in order to save corporate enterprises on water bills..

As a user, added security for media dosent interest me - I just want a better platform and better content.

For once, can you guys work on something that's relevant to the user?

Seriously, how many users burn their Music collection to disk and ask themselves the question, gee - how can I protect this content from myself??

I agree. ANYTHING that's digital can be hacked.

Such is the nature of digital.
If it was hardware, sure, then there are problems...or not.
PS2..Dreamcast...bah.
I just want a quality product. and really. the more code that
goes into something, the more errors you'll get. I remember back in
the old dos days..you'd by a game and you could play it start to
finish no problem. Now you have to download 3 or 4 patches until it
works right - BG2, Diablo 2, Fallout 2 the list goes on...

One important "big picture" issue you guys are missing, content owners/publishers won't or can't publish high quality content via the web because they are seriously concerned about piracy. So it's safe to say you won't see really high quality content published via the web until there is a satisfactory solution to content control in the eyes of the owners/publishers. Once there is a decent solution, it will benefit everyone but the pirates.

"Real disputes Microsoft's claim it was never invited to join the XMCL initiative, stating repeated requests fell on deaf ears."

How many does that make this week??

Come on you all, can't you see it, it's RIGHT THERE IN BLACK AND WHITE!!

-8vO

Hmm I hate to tell you but if you think about it any vid/audio standerd can easily be cracked. Even if you have to go caveman you can download/make a program that can make a vid of whats on the screen. And you can connect a cable from your line out to your line in and record. These companies arn't thinking hard enough.

I agree with just about everybody so far. BUT there is a way to protect some digital media. Let me give two examples and then a
pointer to an interesting website. Example 1 - somebody copies a video with a video camera. Bad news. But imbedded watermarks (which could in principle identify the purchaser) would still be present. If the copy was then posted to a warez site then the watermark identified owner would be seized by the short and curlies. Not perfect but better than current situation. Example 2 - some chunk of digital data (software, video, whatever) has it's digital security broken by a 15 year old kid from Ubatuba Brazil. Bad news. But if the data was required to authenticate against a central server/local hardware configuration, etc. then maybe the thief could be isolated and all other copies automatically resecuried. This approach assumes that the bad guys will win at least some of the time. But never-the-less seriously limits piracy losses. Unfortunately, only one company offers this self-healing digital security. "Would you like to know more?" see www.broadband-buffet.com and look around their products section.

Well, guess what? Just as people can crack the security in the first place, they too can figure out how to modify the file and take out that little identifying watermark or whatever it is you are suggesting be put in there. Come on! Don't be rediculous!