Goodbye 2006, Hello Digital Rights Management- Page 4/5
January 3, 2007
By
Christopher Saunders
Following the Money
Yes, the new level of DRM safeguards appearing in hardware and software translates into higher costs for users. That entails expenditures for buying or upgrading to systems capable of running Vista,12 as well as the cost of a new slate of compatible components, devices, and displays that support an AACS/HDCP-certified delivery chain.
An additional sort of added costs associated with DRM are rarely visible to the consumer, but they're significant. For instance, prices for the new crop of DRM-enabled products reflect the amount of time, effort, and (most importantly) money that went into product development. These are very serious costs that the makers of operating systems, media, media players, graphics hardware, and HDTV and PC displays intend to recoup.
Some of the cost options graphics hardware manufacturers have to incur in adapting to DRM systems. Source: Marsh, "How To Implement Windows Vista Content Output Protection," WinHEC2006 presentation. Link (PPT)
Aside from the development costs, licensing all those fancy high-definition content protection schemes also eats into the expenses of hardware and software developers -- additional fees that you can expect to be passed on to end-users.
These increasing costs inflate the price of PC hardware, media software and OSes without real benefit to consumers. This, in turn, reduces both the utility that users derive from each, as well as the value.
Don't forget the requirement that mandates HDCP-protected content be downscaled then upscaled, and all the CPU-intensive encryption/decryption and authentication going on behind the scenes. Again, buyers will be footing the bill for the added horsepower necessary for this.
Additionally, DRM entails some other costs that consumers can expect to incur. These include the fees paid for licenses13 to additional copies of the same content they already own -- A scenario that's already a commonplace occurrence for folks wishing to use FairPlay-protected iTunes content with their non-Apple devices and music software.14
12As well as any other AACS-compliant operating systems – I'm looking at you, OS X. 13Yes, licenses. Recall that in many cases, you no longer "own" the media that you've bought. 14This is to say nothing of the sheer usability issues wrought by DRM. Take the e-book version of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, a work in the public domain that Adobe republished in 2000. The company packaged the e-book in a DRM wrapper that forbade users from activating the text-to-speech feature in its reader software -- thus preventing a whole host of uses, not the least of which is by visually-impaired users.
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