AACS DRM - what it means to your operating system
There’s a short article by Ken Fisher on Ars Technica about how AACS DRM (the way film studios protect high definition video recordings, e.g Blu-ray and HD DVD) involves adding a hugh amount of complexity to computer operating systems. Microsoft is already suffering from the problems involved, having released Vista; Apple will have similar problems when they upgrade OS X to add the ability to play Blu-ray and HD DVD films. It makes an excellent argument for keeping HD video in a separate box – an HD video player, connected to the TV. Note that the perpetrators of this DRM issue are neither Apple, nor Microsoft, but the film industry.
What I’d like to see, if the operating system manufacturers insist on implementing integration of HD video in their products, is the possibility of buying a reduced feature-set version of the OS without the HD pollution. Unfortunately this is only likely to happen if enough other people share my idea, which I fear they don’t at the moment. Still, I can always change to Linux – there’s no chance that AACS DRM will be ever implemented there, as Linux is an open source system, and AACS relies on keeping the encryption keys secret.