Ed Felten points to a Boing Boing post giving details about Microsoft’s decision to drop HD video support from the 32-bit version of Vista. An anonymous Microsoft employee says:
Media Player won’t play HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, but you’ll still be able to play them (on XP, even) with third-party programs like WinDVD and PowerDVD, in full HD.
Why? Because the media companies are willing to certify WinDVD and PowerDVD, but they won’t certify Windows, basically for the reasons described. The other problem is indemnity – Microsoft has much deeper pockets and the risks of someone hacking Windows and getting the Microsoft keys is too high; Microsoft’s payouts to the studios would be enormous. The DRM contracts essentially say that you forfeit all money lost to the studios if your key is hacked. The money “lost” to the studios is of course calculated using the estimate most favorable to the studios – i.e. every copy downloaded off LimeWire is a full-price loss. Intervideo (WinDVD) and Cyberlink (PowerDVD) are small companies and figure they’re not the largest targets, or they’ll just go bankrupt and start again as a new company. Cyberlink is based in Asia, and suing them would be pricey.
The screwball thing about all this is that essentially the same risks of hacked drivers and whatnot exist with PowerDVD and WinDVD; there’s no good reason for the studios to certify them if they really are worried about people using the PC to copy movies.
This guy and Felten both speculate on why the policy is so confused, but I don’t actually think it’s that mysterious. What we’re seeing here is a case study in what happens when you create a large bureaucracy and charge it with performing an impossible task. In this case, Hollywood executives are trying to accomplish two fundamentally incompatible goals: (1) Make their products widely available and (2) make sure no illicit copies get release to peer-to-peer networks. When you charge a bureaucracy with performing an impossible task, it’s inevitable that the resulting policy will be incoherent. The best the bureaucracy can do is make various token decisions in the directions of accomplishing the stated goal–some of which will inevitably be inconsistent or flatly contradictory to others.
This reminds me for all the world of the policies of the TSA. The TSA, too, has been given an impossible mandate: (1) Remove all dangerous items from planes and (2) don’t unreasonably inconveniencing passengers. But the reality is that thousands of ordinary items are conceivably dangerous. If you really wanted to make airline flight perfectly safe, you would have to make everyone fly naked. So the TSA bans things seemingly at random, driven more by the headlines of the day rather than any kind of coherent security policy based on balancing risks and benefits.
In fact, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to call the behavior of the MPAA, RIAA, and the consumer electronics industry “piracy theater” after Bruce Schneier’s term “security theater.” The TSA forces airline passengers to go through lots of ultimately pointless rituals so that everyone can feel they’re “doing something” about terrorism. Likewise, consumers are forced to submit to a variety of arbitrary restrictions on their use of media content so that the content industries can feel like they’re “doing something” about piracy. In point of fact, the “anti-piracy” measures have about as much impact on piracy as confiscating nail files has on terrorism. But the point isn’t to actually eliminate piracy–it’s to put on a good enough show of reducing piracy to satisfy the people who control the content (who don’t seem to have thought through these issues very carefully) will be satisfied.
Hence, I don’t think there’s much point in expending too much brainpower trying to explain the seemingly incoherent policies of the DVD cartel. Their software-approval policies make precisely as much sense as forcing women to check gel-filled bras. In both cases, the incoherence of the policies are a direct result of the failure of those in charge of the bureaucracies to articulate coherent goals.
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